Will Morrisey Reviews

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. 

 

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

 

The next gam will return the Pequod and its crew to a glimpse of the American regime in the form of the Bachelor, its crew gladly heading back to Nantucket, loaded with sperm oil and intent on partying all the way back. The chapters leading up to this encounter will (to understate the matter) present a contrast to that spirit of festive superficiality.

Ishmael begins by continuing his anatomization of the Sperm Whale, digging down to its “ultimatum,” the skeleton. “Since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale,” but on a later voyage Ishmael saw a rare, nearly complete skeleton on the island of Tranque (today’s Malaita) in the Solomon Islands. Ishmael uses the French name, Arsacides, which means Island of the Assassins; many French and English missionaries had been killed there, and likely eaten, too. No evangelist, Ishmael was safe, having befriended the king, who had collected the skeleton after a whale washed ashore, dead, during a typhoon. He housed it in a temple; the local priests tended it, worshipping it as a god. There is no suggestion that Ishmael’s “royal friend” thinks of it as such. The Solomon-Island king has none of the reverence of Solomon, although he may have some of his practical wisdom.

But the whale skeleton is a god, in its own way. Vines have grown under and through it; “the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures…. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.” This recalls the fate-imagery of the loom worked by Queequeg and Ishmael on the Pequod‘s voyage, but the greater weaver never speaks, and answers no questions. “The weaver-god, he weaves, and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.” Ishmael warns his listeners to be careful, “for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar”—the closest readers will come to an explanation of why Ishmael seems to hear not only the speeches of his officers and fellow crewmen, but their whispers and even their thoughts. Somehow, he has escaped the din of the loom, without dying. This Ishmael is an even more thorough exile than his namesake, an observer of the cosmos, outside even while in it—a bit of a philosopher, that way.

The vines and the skeleton: “Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.” When the priests objected to Ishmael’s efforts at obtaining precise measurements of their god, they fell into disputes amongst themselves, enabling him to complete his work without further disturbance. It is a picture of the effects of religious disputation, and although Ishmael dismisses scientific systems as another form of myth, as always he takes the measure of concrete things—a politic if not necessarily a political philosopher, taking advantage of the foolish disputations of priests. Seventy-two feet long, the skeleton would have stretched some ninety feet when the monster was alive; more than a third of the skeleton consists of the skull and jaw. The skeleton resembled “the embryo hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks”; hunted and hunter resemble one another, and at times their roles reverse. But the skeleton proves a disappointment, finally, as it was “by no means the mold of [the whale’] invested form,” covered in life as it is with vast bulks of cartilage, muscle, fat, spermaceti. “How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes [no part of the skeleton]; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.” Although the great spine resembles Pompey’s Pillar or a Gothic spire—monuments of triumph and of worship, of reaching to the heavens—”some little cannibal urchins, the priests’ children”—had stolen the smaller vertebrae for their games of marbles. “Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at least into simple child’s play.” And how children of reverent fathers may think of the gods of their fathers.

From the present, Ishmael takes his investigation to the past, the “antediluvian point of view” afforded by examination of whale fossils. In having him do so, Melville has him deliver an apologia for the novel: “In the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and  men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and such throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” Considering the Flood, for example, returns Ishmael to “Saturn’s grey chaos,” to the ice ages, when “the whole world was the whale’s,” then “king of creation.” and thus outranking man in Ishmael’s unbiblical vision. (And even in Biblical terms, there was a time before Man’s creation, in which the whale might indeed have ruled the world.) “I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.” Comprehensive, indeed: godlike, though quite impersonal.

Past, present, and to come: Ishmael’s third discussion of the whale looks to the future and dismisses accounts by authorities of the past. Some claim that modern whales are smaller than the ancient species, and that fewer whales exist now than in antiquity. Ishmael denies both claims. The physical evidence suggests that whales are now bigger, despite accounts by Pliny and other ancient writers. Nor are they less numerous; it’s harder to hunt whales than it is to hunt the nearly-exterminated American bison. “For all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality”—immortal as a god, but not as an individual god. The Arsacidian cannibal priests are on to something, but too particular in their worship.

Ahab had incorporated part of an ivory skeleton into his person. Returning to the Pequod‘s deck from the Samuel Enderby, he damaged the leg; it needed replacing. At this point, Ishmael reveals the reason for Ahab’s mysterious delay in appearing on-deck in the initial weeks of the voyage. Shortly before sailing from Nantucket, Ahab was found lying on the ground at night, unconscious, his ivory leg displaced and nearly piercing his groin; he was cured of his injury only with “extreme difficulty.” “That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary reclusiveness.” His small circle of acquaintances on-shore invested this “hinted casualty…with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails,” and “conspired…to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others.” Fedallah and the Manilan tigers were equally secretive and not at all entirely so underived; a reader might speculate that they bear some responsibility for the direful mishap. Is Ahab’s rumored ‘deal with the devil’ (suggested by down-to-earth Stubb) the result of what amounts to a physical and spiritual protection racket? Ahab himself thinks of such matters as a great-souled man, perverted, might: “While even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them…at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an arch-angelic grandeur” derive from “the sourceless primogenitures of the gods,” the Saturn-world. “The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.” Readers see yet again the affinity of outlook between Ahab and Ishmael, his chronicler, who concludes, “let the unseen, ambiguous synod of the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he called a carpenter.” That sounds very much like one of Ishmael’s calling-down-to earth deflations of metaphysical portents, except that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows as Ishmael has already recalled, was a carpenter. What manner of man will the ship’s carpenter prove?

The carpenter proved omnicompetent in repair work, but also “unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious”—that is, he undertook projects proposed by the sailors, however odd the jobs may be. In this, he did rather resemble Jesus, the supreme Repairer of any and all who come to Him. But unlike Jesus, this carpenter was a stolid man, “with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, at one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world,” an ignorer of persons. “He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.” If a sort of Creator-Repairer of his creation, he resembled the god of Ishmael’s world, not the Bible’s, with an “unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes…talking all the time to keep himself awake.” Ishmael’s cosmic weaver, whether personified or not, parodies the solitary God of the Bible.

To make his new leg, Ahab employed both the carpenter and the blacksmith. The blacksmith set to work on the buckle-screw, forged with fire. Ahab approved, observing that fire animated man in the Promethean myth. To Ahab, to Fedallah and the Manilans, life is fire, and they are would-be spirits of the air, free spirits.

As for the carpenter, Ahab engaged him in dialogue. “I dare say thou callest thyself a good workmanlike workman, eh?” If so, can you drive away my sensation of the ‘phantom limb’? “Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?”—as the New Testament testifies of Jesus. The carpenter, stolid creator within a cosmos that answers no questions, merely asked if the ‘phantom limb’ story is true. Assuring him that it is, Ahab pressed on: “How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?” In the gospel according to Ahab, the existence of a soul is an unlifted curse: “If I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!” His laugh is sardonic because Ahab seethed at the thought of needing another being—God or neighbor— for redemption. “Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” Wealthy, he nonetheless saw that he “owes for the flesh in the tongue I brag with.” He wished he could “get a crucible, and [go] into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra”—a compact, self-sufficient piece of whale-ivory, and thus like the god of the Arsacidians. Ahab hated Jesus for two things: He hated the God of the Bible because He prevented him from being a fiery air-spirit, free to fly; he hated God also for creating him, thereby incurring a debt, preventing his self-sufficiency. The remedies he sought—demonic freedom and a sort of ‘crucifixion’ that would condense him into a piece of the lifeless, ivory part of the god that is the cosmos, a piece both tiny and “compendious”—flatly contradict themselves, unless the crucifixion proves the gateway to liberation. But only the God of the Bible can effect that. Or is it rather that Ahab wants to become like his leg, dead and unfeeling, relieved of all sorrows and pain? But that doesn’t solve the problem of the phantom limb, the question of the soul.

Ishmael immediately moves to show how Ahab’s rebellious-tyrannical soul ruled in his regime. As the ship neared the whale-rich seas near Formosa, the sperm-oil casks stowed in the hull began to leak. When First Mate Starbuck asked the Captain for permission to pull the casks up with heavy-duty block and tackle and repair the damaged ones, Ahab characteristically related it all to himself. “Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself!” But what will the owners say, Starbuck asked—as he hoped, rhetorically. He provoked a tyrannical riposte: “Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel.” Entreatingly, Starbuck said he wanted the two of them “to understand each other better than hitherto,” but the tyrant recurred to force, threatening him with a musket, ordering him back on deck. No coward, Starbuck governed his temper, got up from the cabin chair “half calmly,” and concluded the conversation. “Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab.” Alone, Ahab noted that brave Starbuck “nevertheless obeys”—”a most careful bravery, that!” But he also acknowledged to himself that “there’s something there” in the First Mate’s admonition. He followed Starbuck on deck, and made an equally telling, double-edged remark to him: “Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck.” Relenting, Ahab commanded that the casks be lifted. Ishmael, whose knowledge of men’s thoughts seems to come and go, offers two possible explanations for Ahab’s reversal: “It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or a mere prudential policy,” given the urgency of his own mission and his need to avoid any rebellion on board, however remote that possibility may be.

The sailors excavated cask after cask. Queequeg developed a fever caused by “crawling around amid that dampness and slime.” Near death, he too had a request for the carpenter: to build a canoe, so that his body may be placed in it and set adrift, in the way of warriors’ funerals on his native island. He got out of his sickbed long enough to try out the canoe-coffin, which he found satisfactory. Pip hovered nearby, calling himself a coward, Queequeg a general. And if Queequeg reached the Antilles, would he please seek out Pip—who, Pip knew, was lost at sea. But Queequeg wouldn’t be going anywhere; he recovered as suddenly as he had fallen ill, claiming that he willed himself to live, having recalled some duty on-shore. “Mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.” The coffin became his sea-chest, which he marked with same figures and drawings with which he’d been tattooed by “a departed prophet and seer on his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” in a script Queequeg himself could not read. And so the theory and the treatise alike would perish with him, “unsolved to the last.” Ahab considered him one morning. Never one to overlook yet another source of self-torment, he exclaimed, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”—those beings who reveal their secrets in signs no man can comprehend, beyond the prophet who receives the revelations.

The Pequod entered the South Sea, Ishmael’s dreamed-of destination. “This mysterious divine Pacific zones the whole world about, makes all coasts bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.” Pan-like, it also seemed an Arcadia of the water, full of the pleasures of music and nymphs. “But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain” in “that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.” He turned next to the blacksmith, with his “patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.” No Biblical echoes in him: It was Hephaestus who made weapons for the Olympians before being flung by Zeus from the heavens into the ocean. The same thing happened to blacksmith Perth. On land he had enjoyed a happy home, but met with a double assault from the fates: first, his home was emptied by a burglar whom he “himself did ignorantly conduct” into it. “It was the Bottle Conjuror!”—alcoholic drink, to be sure, but also a reference to a hoax in a London theater in 1749, in which a crowd paid to see a magician place himself into a quart bottle, only to be disappointed. Ahab had wished to perform a similar trick of self-concentration, equally impossible. (Hephaestus too suffered a delusion, marrying seductive Aphrodite only to be cuckolded by warlike Ares.) The blacksmith never regained his prosperity; his older brother died, leaving him with crushing additional responsibilities. Eventually, his wife and two of their children also died. “The houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape.” But like Hephaestus, instead he went to sea; “the all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful new-life adventures.” He is deceived again, but this time by the beckoning mermaids, who promise marriage but only after death.

Ahab met Perth’s patience with impatience. “How can’st thou endure without being mad?” But although he could face agonies imposed by the fates and even by himself, even this blacksmith couldn’t smooth the creases on the Captain’s brow, what Ahab took to be the birth-mark on the brow of man, incised by cruel gods. Perth could obey his captain’s orders, making him a harpoon out of hardest steel, the kind used for the nails in the hooves of race horses. Once the harpoon was forged, Ahab insisted on finishing the job himself, as Fedallah gazed at the flame. Ahab had the finished harpoon tempered with the blood of the pagan harpooneers “in the name of the devil.” The pole was hickory, the hardest American hardwood; new tow-line was braided for the rope. “This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon,” his “delirious” howls mocked by the “wretched laugh” of mocking Pip. Are the three Fates to doom Moby-Dick, or will they entwine Ahab?

If ivory stands for the lifeless framework of the cosmos, steel for the lifeless thing that kills life, the gold of the sunset on the peaceful Pacific stands for life, giving the ocean the appearance of a “rolling prairie” full of flowers and tall grasses. “All this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,and form one seamless whole.” “However temporary,” the effects of “such soothing scenes,” they moderated Ahab—the sunlight’s “golden keys” opening “his own secret golden treasuries,” until “his breath upon them prove[d] but tarnishing.” “Would to God these blessed calms would last,” Ishmael mused, but, as the weaver-god would have it, “the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.” There is no progress. In this, Ishmael departs from the optimistic historicism of his century and the next. “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” Nowhere: “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” As before the other golden thing, the doubloon, Starbuck and Stubb found in the glittering Pacific at sunset a reflection of their own souls. Starbuck piously murmured, “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” But one can’t really look deep down into water that reflects the sunlight. Stubb also stayed on the surface, in his own less meditative way. “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!”

And so to the gam with the Bachelor, her whole crew jolly as Stubb. She was an American ship, out of Nantucket, heading home a “glad ship of good luck,” loaded down with casks of sperm oil, its crew dancing with Polynesian girls, all watched over by their jovial, Pan-like captain, who invited Ahab aboard with glass and bottle aloft. To Ahab’s “gritted” query about the White Whale, the ‘Pan’ happily replied, “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all.” Hoping for some sign of darkness, Ahab asked if he’d lost any men. “Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all,” ‘Pan’ blithely replied. If Ahab will but come aboard and join the party, “I’ll soon take that black from your brow,” that hitherto ineffaceable birth-mark from the gods. Judging him a fool, which in many respects his counterpart surely is, Ahab told  him, “Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst” [perhaps disaster might yet strike them down]; well, call me an empty ship, and outward bound.” This is the only other “call me” command spoken in the yarn, echoing Ishmael’s original. In both cases, they are spoken by a self-understood outcast, and in both cases spoken accurately. “So go thy ways, and I will mine,” Ahab bids—his way against the gentle breeze, the Bachelor‘s ways with it. Reminded of the home toward which the opposite ship was bound, Ahab took a small vial filled with sand, Nantucket sand, the land on which his young wife awaited him. But unlike his pipe, which he disdainfully pitched into the sea because it gave him pleasure, Ahab didn’t empty the vial and throw it away. He did indeed have his humanities.

 

 

 

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

 

Melville now shifts his readers’ attention from France to the country that defeated France. Triumphant in the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Britain of Melville’s day ruled the oceans with her commerce and industry, in service of world history’s most extensive empire. In the chapters leading up to a gam with a British whaling ship out of London, Ishmael describes the effects of industrialism aboard the Pequod.

He begins with the yarn of Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew,” a diminutive free black who served, along with his white counterpart, “Dough-Boy,” as a ship-keeper—one of those who stay behind on the ship when the whale boats go out on the hunt. This “most significant event” prophesied “whatever shattered sequel” the Pequod itself “might” meet.

Cheerful, tambourine-playing, life-loving Pip shone with exuberance on ship, as he had done on the village green in his Connecticut hometown. But if a diamond exhibits a “healthful glow” in daylight, in the jeweler’s shop, set against a dark background and lit by “unnatural gases,” it becomes “infernally superb,” “like some crown jewel stolen from the King of Hell.” And so bright Pip. Pressed into service on a whale boat when one of Stubb’s crew was injured while collecting ambergris, he caused the Second Mate to lose a whale, partly by accident and partly out of his own panic during the chase. Stubb issued a warning: “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” The sinister light of diamonds under conditions of sale; the dangers of sharp-spading for valuable ambergris, and trafficking in human beings: Commerce promises great enhancements of vitality but exacts a price for it. As Ishmael dryly remarks, “Perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.”

Pip soon tested the limits of Stubb’s benevolence, panicking again on the next try at a whale. He jumped overboard in fright, and Stubb, true to his brusque word, left him behind in the ocean, expecting that another boat would retrieve him. “Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.” If Melville intends the traditional pun on sun and Son here, he suggests that the Son was foresaken, crucified, elevated to the heavens, and yet offers no salvation to man, leaving helpless Pip in the “intolerable” and “awful loneliness” of the vast Pacific Ocean.

“By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul”—almost. As in the Bible, so in Melville’s novel the sea is home to “the unwarped primal world”; on and in it “the miser-merman Wisdom revealed his hoarded heaps” to castaway Pip. “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom”—the loom of fate—and bore witness to it. “So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” In this Pip became a sort of brother to Ahab, except that while Pip testified to an indifferent God, Ahab assumed a malevolent one—the ocean suggesting indifference, the Whale intention. Ahab’s God, embodied in the Whale, is Satanic; Pip’s more comprehensive embodiment of God, the ocean in which the Whale swims, has proved as indifferent as the human, economic forces and inclinations that combined to cast him into it.

Stubb killed the whale he abandoned Pip to hunt, and the great corpse must then be processed. Its sperm crystallizes when exposed to air, so the first thing the sailors did was to squeeze the lumps back into fluid—”a sweet and unctuous duty!” Ishmael exclaims. The first stage of industrial ‘processing,’ the one closest to nature, where human hands restore the generative part of nature to its original state, provides the human manipulator with short-lived relief from the war of all against all. “I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven”—like the loom of fate—”almost within the hour.” Ishmael could forget “our horrible oath”—the unnatural, polluting oath—to hunt the Whale; so much so, “I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying threat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.” This is the natural baptism of the natural religion, producing “a strange sort of insanity” (counterbalancing the insanity the ocean caused in Pip), overcoming the condition of isolato-ism: “I found myself squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules,” in “an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling” nearest to the state of grace man experiences in Melville’s nature—”the very milk and sperm of kindness.” Would that it would last “for ever!” “For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the hearth, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze eternally,” ready for night-dreams of “long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.” Pip’s lost joie de vivre returned not to him but to his witness, if only temporarily, with this human analogue to the center of the whales’ armada and this social equivalent to the inner Tahiti of the soul.

Because business is business. Ishmael describes several other products taken from the dead whale, to be cut up in the “blubber-room” with sharpened spades—the sort of dangerous work that injured Stubb’s crewman when extracting ambergris. In yet another parody of churchiness, Ishmael remarks the preliminary ‘blessing’ of the cutting-up, as the sailors skinned the penis of the whale, dried it on the rigging, then helped one of their mates into it, making him look like a bishop in his “decent black” vestments. “What a lad for a Pope were this mincer!”

Modern industrialism proved less than holy, as a vision of Hell replaced Ishmael’s vision of Heaven. The whale-parts go into the try-pots, heated with “snaky flames.” Tended by the “fiend shapes” of “pagan harpooneers,” resounding with their “uncivilized laughter,” smelling like Hindu funeral pyres, the try-pot spirit pervaded the ship. “The rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into this blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” Standing at the helm of the ship, steering it, Ishmael briefly fell asleep, awakening disoriented, somehow having turned around—converted—away from the ship’s compass, toward the glowing try-works, no longer “bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern” with “a stark, bewildered feeling, as of death.” As he regained his bearings, the “unnatural hallucination” ended, but: “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm.” Even in daytime, when the sun dispels the perplexing gloom, the ocean itself remains, “which is two thirds of this earth. “Therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.” The “truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows,” Jesus. The true books of the Bible are Solomon’s, made of “the fine hammered steel of woe” that comes from understanding that all is vanity. “This willful world hath not got hold of un-Christian Solomon’s wisdom yet,” and only “sick men,” sufferers, like poets William Cowper and Arthur Young, philosophers Pascal and Rousseau, prove true, not “care-free” Rabelais, or Pip before being cast away. Gazing at the fire too long causes a man to wander out of the way of understanding, Solomon teaches, bringing the wanderer into the congregation of the dead.

Neither Pip nor Ahab, then, bears comprehensive witness: “There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” In some men, however, “there is a Catskill eagle,” a soul “that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” The eagle’s soul knows the sorrow of Jesus, the prophet, priest, and king, and the practical wisdom of Solomon, the poet-philosopher-king of Scripture. Nor does such wisdom confine itself to such an eminence, as seen when the sailors take their empty lamps for refilling in the night. “With what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps,” fills them with plentiful oil, fresh and genuine because he hunted for it. Merchant sailors live in darkness, trafficking in goods they neither acquired nor produced for themselves. After night falls, whalemen live by the light of a moderated and cheering fire. Human industry that stays close to nature, yes; industrialism, no. In Young America, the few eagles and the many lamp-men might form an alliance against the excesses of commerce and industry.

If so, the ship of state will be cleansed, at least sometimes. Once the whale has been fully dismembered, it parts processed and stored, the sperm oil cleans the ship, leaving its planks unstained and fragrant. Ishmael never forgets the real, ever-cycling world, though: “Many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of ‘There she blows!’ and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again”—a “man-killing” exercise. “Yet this is life.” “Old Pythagoras” was right; in this worldly sense at least, life reincarnates itself perpetually.

It is hard to see that cycle, because human souls themselves often get in their own way as they attempt to understand the world. Returning to the “horrible oath” the crew swore with Ahab, Ishmael records the soliloquies seven men deliver as they contemplate the doubloon Ahab nailed to the mast. Each ‘read’ the markings stamped on the doubloon (regarded as “the white whale’s talisman”) in accordance with the nature of his soul. Ahab saw in it “egotistical mountain-tops and towers,” “proud as Lucifer”; he quite self-consciously saw himself; “all” the figures on the doubloon “are Ahab,” sailing “from storm to storm!” “So be it, then,” he concludes. Starbuck read the doubloon with characteristic pious pessimism; “in this vale of Death, God girds us round, and all over our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope.” But his piety immediately gives way: “Oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!” In his genteel, not-quite-Christian decency, he reveals his soul in giving up: “I will quit” gazing at the doubloon, “lest Truth shake me falsely.” Here is how Ishmael learned, as he had announced early on, that Starbuck could never stand against spiritual terror.

Worldly Stubb saw no suggestions of God in the doubloon but a picture of “the life of man,” circling from birth to death like the signs of the Zodiac. Flask saw no meaning in it at all; it is money. The old Manxman saw it betokening an ill omen. Queequeg silently compared the markings on the coin with the tattoos on his body, finding Sagittarius, the archer, the right image for a harpooneer; he finally gave up trying to figure the thing out, knowing that he did not know. As befitted a man who had gazed at the fire too long, Fedallah saw the burning image of the sun on the coin and bowed to his god, the fire. Finally, Pip stepped up, having watched all the others, including Ishmael. He was the true ‘reader’ or prophet of the doubloon, foreseeing the ship’s destruction in its markings. Having discovered the primal sea, he expected it to claim the Pequod and its men. Each man saw part of the truth in the doubloon, refracted by his own soul. Socrates-like, it is Ishmael who gathers the speeches of all, presenting the more comprehensive understanding.

To the gam, then—that is, to the dialogue. The Samuel Enderby, of London, bore the name of the founder of a prominent mercantile firm, the first to fit out English whale ships that “regularly hunted the Sperm Whale”—this, only a year before America’s Declaration of Independence. (Ishmael hastily adds that the Nantucketers  “were the first among mankind to harpoon [the Sperm Whale] with civilized steel.”) The ship’s “burly, good-natured” Captain Boomer had lost an arm to Moby-Dick, a fact that induced Ahab to make the unprecedented gesture of boarding a rival ship, despite the difficulty of hoisting him aboard. Unlike Ahab, the English captain thanked God that his arm was nearly severed by the harpoon stuck to the side of the Whale; otherwise, he would have been dragged beneath the ocean. He preferred an amputated arm to that, and bore the Whale no grudge. The ship physician (a former clergyman) explained that whales can’t digest men’s arms, anyway: “What you,” Ahab, “take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness,” as the monster “only thinks to terrify by feints,” not to injure. Needless to say, Ahab was having none of that. Captain Boomer concluded, “No more White Whales for me. He’s best left alone.” The commercial-industrial and eminently sane Brits judged Ahab to be mad. As for Ahab, he set his “face like flint”—a man of sorrows, indeed, although more in the mold of an anti-Christ than the Christ who so set His face as he walked off to His Crucifixion.

Ishmael adds a coda to the yarn. “Very long after” this voyage, Ishmael joined another gam on the Samuel Enderby, finding it “a jolly ship” with a hospitable crew—”crack fellows all.” He asked why English whalers were famous for their hospitality, and answers with a bit of history. Hollanders, Zealanders, and Danes preceded England in whaling, and “their fat old fashions” included “plenty to eat and drink” on board. “High livers,” they stocked their ships with beer, gin, and beef. Although English merchant-ships, their owners eying the profit margin, scrimp their crews, the whalers imitate their northern European predecessors. “Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental and particular”—a matter of their regime, as it were. On this matter, Ishmael draws an Epicurean moral: “If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it.” One might call that the inner Tahiti of the gut; the regime of England enjoys it.