Archives for January 2019

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967.

 

Note: This is the first of a series of commentaries on Melville’s novel. The plan is to follow the story from beginning to end, retracing the voyage recounted by the story-teller, Ishmael.

 

On the frontispiece, Melville quotes John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Leviathan, hugest of living creatures,” embodies a double paradox; he “seems a moving land” and “his breath spouts out a sea.” Land and water, breath and water: These are the terms of God’s creation in Genesis. Turning immediately to the “etymology” of the word “whale,” Melville quotes the English geographer, chaplain, and writer Richard Hakluyt, present at the genesis of the English settlement of North America as a promoter of the Jamestown colony; like Hakluyt, Melville writes of navigations and discoveries. Like Hakluyt, does Melville also intend to be a founder in the ‘New World’? Hakluyt writes, “While you take in hand to school others, and teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our own tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”

Why so? The letter ‘H’ in Hebrew signifies “behold,” referring to the way we hold our breath when gazing at (for example) the hugest of living creatures. God’s prophets often tell His people to behold in awe the works of God. For His part, God gives life to the clay that becomes man by breathing into it. More still, according to learned rabbis the word haishim refers to the fiery inner core or fiery “souls” of the atoms that compose the world God created. Above all, the Tetragrammaton, which stands for God’s unspeakable name, consists of the letters YHVH; further Hashem means the Name.  Melville’s book will ask us to behold water, breath, and fire, along with the massive ‘land’ or matter which moves like the earth in an earthquake, killing its would-be conquerors and sending them, as the old saying goes, to a watery grave. In the Book of Genesis, the Creator-God separates chaotic water from stable land; for Milton, as a “moving land” with breath spouting water, Leviathan challenges or seems to challenge the principle of separation God follows throughout his act of creation—beginning with the separateness of Creator from created, but continuing to the separation of land from water and the differentiation of the many kinds of created things in His creation and even the differentiation of his human creations into male and female. The “Satan” or enemy himself separates himself from God, exiles himself from God’s kingdom and attempts to ruin His creation by provoking God to do what Satan himself lacks the power to do: bring death to the human ruler of the paradise within that creation. The Romantics in philosophy and poetry often admired Satan, one of them going so far as to say that Milton was on the devil’s side without knowing it.

Whose side is Melville on? He confided to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that his book’s secret motto was Ego non baptiso te in nomine patrie, sed in nomine diaboli—an invocation his Captain Ahab pronounces while baptizing his harpoon with the blood of his three pagan harpooneers. [1] Melville could let Hawthorne in on the secret, having read Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” which culminates in the calamity of the protagonist’s satanic baptism; Hawthorne, too, understood the dark side of human life better than their New England and New York City literary contemporaries. Yet Ahab loses his battle with the Whale, and only Ishmael survives to tell us. What does Ishmael want his readers to learn from his tale? What does Melville want them to learn? Both Ishmael and Melville have taught school, even as Hakluyt would teach teachers, in his books, so they are no strangers to the authority of teaching, with its precepts and commands.

Melville next provides us with a list of eighty quotes or “extracts” from various authors ranging from Moses to Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson to Nantucket balladeers. The Hebrew Bible tells us that God created the whale and also will punish it with death; Hobbes calls the modern state, made by human “art,” the “great Leviathan”—”an artificial man” who rules absolutely; Jefferson describes the Spermacetti Whale naturalistically, as “an active, fierce animal” which “requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen” who sail out of Nantucket to kill it; the whalers themselves combine Hobbes and Jefferson, singing of “the rare old Whale” as “a giant in might” of the ocean, “where might is right.” The whale is natural, not artificial, but like Hobbes’s Leviathan a king, “King of the boundless sea.” In Hobbes, the artificial mighty Leviathan, the modern state, imposes order on the chaos of the state of nature, composed of atoms; for the republican Jefferson, who most emphatically disbelieves that might makes right and that nature lacks moral laws, the men who hunt the whale are the heroes. Without saying so, Melville will address the Jeffersonian founding of the United States of America, with its grounding in natural right, the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. He has in mind a new American Founding.

Melville titles his first chapter “Loomings,” accustoming his readers to his Shakespearean fondness for puns, and thereby his fondness for Shakespearean language and themes. “Loomings” means portents; dangers loom. “Loomings” also mean the weaved garments produced on looms, symbolic of Fate’s work if not God’s. Looms are for yarn; this sailor’s yarn or story begins, famously, “Call me Ishmael.” That sentence does not declare, nor does it question, nor does it request; it commands. Ruling, and therefore politics, will loom large here.

Why choose “Ishmael” as the name one wants to be called, at the outset of the yarn? Genesis 16 relates events leading to the founding of Israel, God’s covenant with Abram, thereafter Abraham or “father of many nations.” The Flood, or the return of chaotic water over all the land, wiped the increasingly evil world of post-lapsarian humanity away; God set down the Noachide Commandments to govern all men. But the covenant with Abraham legislates for a particular regime, the regime for God’s chosen people, a people commanded to do and to be better than the general run of nations. The problem is that Abraham’s wife is sterile. She gives Abram her maid as a second wife, to enable him to generate a child, to continue his people. Hagar—another ‘H’ name—wants nothing to do with the plan, but an angel of God persuades her to consummate the marriage, promising that her son—to be named Ishmael, meaning, “The LORD has heard thy affliction”—will be the first of a multitude. More ominously, Ishmael “will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.” His people will not be the children of the Covenant, the children of Abraham and Sarah born after God makes Sarah able to bear children, despite her great age. At the same time, God promises that Ishmael will beget twelve princes as the progenitor of “a great nation.”

The English settlers in New England regarded themselves as founders of regimes governed by the laws of the Covenant. They were descendants of Abraham through Israel, not through Ishmael. It should be noticed that the Jamestown settlement Hakluyt assisted in founding was not so governed; rather, it was a mercantile establishment. If not of Israel, then, necessarily of Ishmael. The United States of America, the American people, formed a tensile combination of Israelite and Ishmaelite characters. Melville’s Ishmael journeys to New Bedford, Massachusetts on his way to Nantucket—an Ishmael in Israelite territory but now partly given over to the commercial purposes of the whaling industry. To what extent can the awe-inspiring whale be made merely an object of acquisition and trade? In finding out, this Ishmael will learn things Americans who stay on land do not know.

Melville had learned those things on his own whaling voyages in the early 1840s. He returned to an America whose intellectual and political classes saw a generational shift in political intentions. The “Young America” movement gathered such prominent political figures as presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas. Following the call of the writer John L. O’Sullivan for America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the remainder of the middle of the North American continent, Young America, while staying within the dominant Democratic Party, combined the longstanding Democratic policy of free trade, low tariffs, with the Whig Party policy of internal improvements—infrastructure designed to hasten the advance of Americans to the Pacific coast. The Young Americans attempted to settle the slavery controversy that threatened the Union by valorizing popular sovereignty in a way the American Founders had not done. The Founders’ regime located sovereignty in the people, but the people must adhere to the greater sovereignty of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; by proposing that newly-acquired territories west of the Mississippi River vote slavery up or down, then be admitted as new states of the Union on the basis of that majority decision, Senator Douglas and New America generally were “blowing out the moral lights around us,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln in 1858 by arguing that majority rule, a form of might, not moral law, made right. But the boundless sea, where might makes right, can be ruled only by Leviathan, the mightiest of the mighty. This would bring America to Hobbes and absolute monarchy in principle, if not immediately in practice.

Melville initially supported Young America, publishing in its main literary journal, the Democratic Review. [2] But by the time he wrote Moby-Dick he had become increasingly disenchanted; in his subsequent novel, a parody of the life of Jesus titled Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, he would deride literary New America as too genteel, too ‘idealistic’ about ‘the democracy,’ the people of America. His Ishmael, in but no longer of American society because he had experienced the searing events of shipwreck, functions as a prophetic witness to Americans, ‘young’ or not. The great nation he would found will understand God and nature far differently than any existing Americans had hitherto done. This new nation would reject Christianity and also then-fashionable Transcendentalism as ‘idealizing’ veils over the chaotic waters that surround and, in the fiery form of molten rock undergird the seemingly stable land. At the same time, it would also reject the insane quest to rule chaos, a quest that causes the would-be conqueror to imitate his intended prey in his self-destructive, and regime-destructive, malice disguised as moral outrage. And although it would not reject commerce as a way of life, it would know that peaceful commerce isn’t all there is to human life and nature, human or otherwise.

Given his distance from much of existing American doctrine, Ishmael adopts the irony if not necessarily the dialectic of Socrates. He offers his readers a lighthearted account of going to sea to counteract ‘the blues’ or, as he puts it, “the hypoes.” “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.” Moreover, “all men”—the democracy itself—”cherish nearly the same feelings from time to time,” longing to get away from civil society to think, to dream, to be “wild.” In New York City, people interrupt their commercial busy-ness to stare at the sea “with ocean reveries,” congregating along the shore as “crowds of water-gazers.” In the countryside they gravitate to lakes and streams, for the same reason. “Meditation and water are wedded forever” in the minds of artists, poets, and boys. Religious men, too, from the Persians to the Greeks, seek the water; Ishmael doesn’t mention the waters of Christian baptism, but they cannot be far from his mind. But in these meditations the seekers find not God but themselves. Water reflects; “we see ourselves in all rivers and oceans.” Narcissus drowns, seeking “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life,” “the key to it all.” The breath of life, the “H” in the whale, does not lend itself to human control. Proverbially the individual in love with himself, Narcissus illustrates the perils of self-love as it gazes at life and sees only itself. Ishmael will almost drown at sea, but not quite; water or life absorbs the self-absorbed, but Ishmael isn’t entirely self-absorbed, and he survives.

Continuing his apologia for his conduct, Ishmael remarks that he goes to sea not as a passenger (he has no money), nor as an officer (as a former schoolmaster, “I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials and tribulations whatsoever”). “It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself.” He does take care of himself, but doesn’t mind being ruled by others on ship. As a sailor, he must follow orders. But the New Testament tells us to accept our station in life, however menial, and for that matter, “Who ain’t a slave?” Every human being gets thumped “either in a physical or metaphysical” way. Metaphysical democracy or egalitarian thumping prevails over all; Being itself pushes all of us around. Having thus vindicated his honor as one who is ruled and not the ruler, Ishmael addresses the needs of the body. Unlike passengers, sailors get paid. The “urbane activity with which a man receives money” shows up either the self-contradiction or the hypocrisy of Christians, who believe money the root of all evil. “Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!” The common sailor’s body benefits not only from the human artifact of money but from “the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck,” from nature, benefits he gains to a greater degree than his ruler, the Commodore on the quarter-deck, standing as he is behind the forecastle deck. Does the putative ruler really rule at all? Just as the Commodore only thinks he breathes fresh air, but really breathes air already breathed by the sailors, “in much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.” Is monarchy only democracy disguised? And finally, what rules them all, if not “the invisible police officer of the Fates”? They are the ones who “cajol[ed] me into the delusion that [going to sea] was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.” In calling the Fates “stage managers,” Ishmael invokes neither the Bible nor human conquest, but the ancient Greek/pagan claim that even the gods are the ruled and not the rulers. The Fates weave the destinies of gods and human beings alike. They are the ultimate ‘loomers.’

Having done so, playful and ironic Ishmael immediately lists his principal motive for going to sea on a whaling ship: “the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.” “Such a portentous”—looming—”and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.” His motto might be, ‘I wander because I wonder.’ If for the Bible’s prophets fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, for philosophers wonder is. But to wonder is to wonder at things beyond the land, beyond civil society; it is to become a “wild man” of sorts, an Ishmael in the modern world, in America. Wonderers and wanderers push beyond civil boundaries or conventions. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good”—in this he differs from his ruler aboard ship, Captain Ahab—”I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.” And so to the water, to the surface of chaos; “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open” to a voyage in which two “wild conceits” “swayed me to my purpose,” floating “in my inmost soul”: “endless processions of the whale,” that king of the boundless sea, “and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” Moby-Dick, the snow-white king of all kings of the boundless sea, appears for the first time in this yarn in the mind not of Ahab, whom he obsesses, but Ishmael. Ishmael knows about the white whale before he meets Ahab, before embarking on the voyage of the Pequod. This is the invisible mind-link between captain and sailor, ruler and ruled, the one who wants to close in on the white whale to destroy it, the other who wants to close in on the white whale in order to understand and in some sense befriend it. The mother of the Biblical Ishmael addresses God as El Roi, —”God of seeing” or “Thou God seest me,” understands me. The modern Ishmael wants to see, not to kill, perhaps to be seen, and surely not to be killed. Americans too need to come to terms with the white whale, if they are to perceive reality as it is without bringing destruction upon themselves.

 

Notes

1. In his brilliant account of Melville’s thoughts on Shakespeare, Charles Olson pulls out a longer Latin tag Melville wrote on the fly-leaf of his copy of the volume containing the tragedies: Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti—sed in nomine Diaboli. As Olson notes, in the secret motto Melville disclosed to Hawthorne he retained the reference to God the Father but omitted the Son and the Holy Spirit entirely. See Charles Olson: Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947).
2. For an account of Melville and the Young America movement, see Andrew Delbanco: Melville: His World and His Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 95-96.