Archives for March 2019

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.

 

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

 

The next ten chapters culminate in a gam with the second foreign whale ship, this one from France—a major political and military power in Europe, but not in whaling. The French had always been landsmen, unlike the Spanish, the English, and the Americans.

Ishmael’s jibe at the falsehood of prophecy, following his more extensive debunking of science (the pride of modern Germany) in the previous chapter, proves a prelude to a more extensive satire on religion, rather along the lines of Voltaire, that quintessential French Enlightener. He begins with a chapter on “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (glancing slyly at the last words of the Lord’s Prayer?), in which he playfully cites “the gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter,” as “the first whaleman.” He then proposes that the Christian hero, St. George, slayed not a dragon but a whale. More jovially still, he announces that “by the best contradictory authorities” we learn that the story of Hercules and the whale is said to derive from “the still more ancient story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa.” Ranging farther afield, he recalls that the Hindu god Vishnu manifested himself as a whale in the first of “his ten earthly incarnations,” in order to rescue the Vedas, then lying in the depths of the cosmic waters, books “whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation.” Greek polytheism, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism all amount to the same thing: vehicles for a mock-exaltation of whaling and a simultaneous undermining of religious authority.

Returning to Jonah, Ishmael remarks that a Sag-Harbor whaleman doubted the story, but in so doing only “evinced the foolish pride of reason,” a “foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy.” But “old Sag-Harbor” “had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea”—that is, experience and commonsense thinking. After all, not only Catholic priests but “the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.” What greater testimony do we need?

Exercising learning picked up from the sun and the sea, Queequeg prepared his whale-boat for a chase, which occurred the next morning; such learning produces more reliable predictions than alleged prophecy. This incident also provides Ishmael the chance to describe another practical way to kill whales. If a whale ‘runs’ too far and fast to make harpooning it prudent, an experienced whaler can pitchpole it instead. He takes a long lance designed for the purpose and hurls it at the whale; instead of embedding itself deeply into the whale, the lance wounds the whale, drawing blood. The whaler pulls it back and darts the whale repeatedly, causing the whale to die the proverbial death of a thousand cuts. Insofar as Ishmael has playfully compared the Sperm-Whale to a god, it might be said that his narrative aims at causing the idea of gods as handed down by prophetic tradition and orthodox churchmen to die such a death.

Nor is Ishmael done, turning next to the pretensions of philosophers. Ishmael addresses the question of whether the whale-spout is water or mist. The whale breathes through its spiracle, not its mouth; it has a network of blood vessels which acts as a storage place for the air it takes in, when on the surface of the ocean. This allows the whale to stay submerged for long periods of time, and to dive deep. “My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist.” He bases this on no further empirical data, but upon “considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale,” a being “both ponderous and profound,” like Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil (presumably in Milton’s version), Dante, “and so on”—one must pause to admire that “and so on”—and therefore of the sort who emits “a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.” After drinking six cups of hot tea in “my thin shingled attic,” on an August noon,” I myself, Ishmael, find moisture in my hair, if I have been “plunged in deep thought.” Not only that, but the whale-spout is often “glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal on his thoughts,” and rainbows never “visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor”—an observation gleaned from exact perception of experience, not from Scripture or scientific theory. In response to his own musings, Ishmael “thank[s] God”: “For all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” If science, religion, and philosophy all are dubious, then a cautious, overall agnosticism recommends itself to Melville’s yarn-spinner.

Ishmael then turns to an object of unquestionable power, the Sperm Whale’s tail. If whaling shares in the honor and glory owed God in the Lord’s Prayer, the unspoken third word, power, belongs to the whale, the object of the whalers’ hunt. “In the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.” “The whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof”—recall the mat Ishmael and Queequeg wove, symbol of the structure of the cosmos—”of muscular fibres and filaments” all running toward the two flukes of the tail, “contribut[ing] to their might.” “Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it,” exhibiting “a Titanism of power,” the power of the pre-Olympic gods, the pre-god gods. At the same time, even if the whale and its tail lack l’esprit de géométrie (generated by the brain), they do not lack l’esprit de finesse, as the tail undulates with ease: “Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it.”  Indeed, “When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there,” very much in contrast with “the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures” of His Son, embodying “the mere negative, feminine [power] of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, for the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.” (Machiavelli concurs, commending lo Stato as the more effective preserver of human lives, if not necessarily their souls.) More, when he has seen “the gigantic tail” rising from the ocean Ishmael thinks of “majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic [Sea] of Hell”; if in a “Dantean” mood while viewing this sight, Ishmael envisions devils, “if in [the mood] of Isaiah, the archangels.” A pod of whales heading toward the sun, with their tails momentarily uplifted in preparation for a dive, recall visions of Persian fire worshippers, and, like the actions of gods, whale gestures often “remain wholly inexplicable.” “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.” And if I cannot know the tail of the whale, how shall I comprehend his front, his face, especially “when face he has none”? Like the God of the Bible, “Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.” Having disposed of the grander claims of science, religion, and philosophy—of systems—Ishmael here sketches a playfully proposed but seriously intended version of ‘natural religion.’ And generally, this and the four previous chapters show him treating the heavy, ponderous monster, whale or god, with a light touch, with a sort of gaya scienza that fits the Pequod‘s movement toward an encounter with a ship from France.

Before that encounter, the ship needed to pass through the Strait of Malacca, “the most southerly part of all Asia,” and the gateway to islands holding “inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory.” Although the Strait is easily navigable, real hazards abide there: pirates from Sumatra and Java. Although Ahab had no interest in the riches of the East, intending merely to get to the prime whaling-grounds on the far coast of Japan, the pirates would attack any kind of ship. And Ahab might have needed to linger there, out of token respect for his ostensible mission; the seas off Java also promise good whale-hunting.

Ishmael titles this chapter “The Grand Armada,” alluding to the Spanish expedition against England, and this seems apt. Like France (and England) Spain pioneered in building the modern, centralized state. The “armada” here consists of a confederation of whale pods. Under persistent attack from whaleships, Sperm Whales, like feudal dynasties, now often mass together; “it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” The Pequod‘s captain and crew found themselves in a double chase. To their rear, Malayan pirates pursued them; for their part, the American vessel chases an armada of whales. Ahab registered the irony. Whale-men, after all, amount to piratical raiders on the centrally-organized community—the ‘modern state’ or perhaps the ’empire’— of whales.

In numbers there is strength, but there is also disorder, inasmuch as the larger the community the more elements there are to coordinate. As the Pequod gained distance from the pirates and moved nearer the armada, the whales showed signs of panic; they were “gallied,” a word derived from the same root as “gallows,” and exhibiting some of the same terror gallows inspire. In one of his footnotes to his novel Melville offers an etymology of the word, arguing that it dates back to Saxon times, “emigrat[ing] to the New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth,” in a process by which “the best and furthest-descended English words”—the aristocrats of the language—”are now democratised, nay, plebeianized… in the New World.” Gallying does in fact reflect the regime of democracy, instancing the “occasional timidity… characteristic of all herding creatures,” not “outdone by the madness of men.” If the whale-armada resembles a modern state or empire, its regime resembles democracy.

Queequeg harpooned a whale, which headed for the center of the armada, dragging the boat along. The crewmen needed to maneuver through the thrashing mob of panicky whales. The whale worked its way off the harpoon, and the boat glided into the center of the whale-‘state.’ This gave Ishmael a rare look at the inner workings of the whales’ ‘regime,’ its way of life. “They say” an “enchanted calm lurks at the heart of every commotion,” and respecting the whale armada hearsay is correct. It was “as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold,” and they had found security there, “evinc[ing] a wondrous fearlessness and confidence” toward the whalers; “like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them,” while allowing the sailors to touch them. Mating and nursing, the whales at the center of the armada form a ‘political’ inner Tahiti. Ishmael recalls “the sagacious saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish”—and it proved true, here; the Pequod‘s boats killed only one whale on this expedition. When pods band together in a large ‘modern state,’ it works as intended, providing effective defense against piratical raiders.

This ‘state’ does another thing modern states do: It sends out pioneers, called schools, some predominantly female, some consisting of young bulls. Typically, the female schools have “a male of full grown magnitude” as their escort or “schoolmaster,” whom Ishmael compares to a harem master of the Ottoman Empire, occasionally challenged by young bulls plotting a coup; “deadly battle, all for love,” ensues. If not deposed, the schoolmaster ages, if not gracefully. Gradually, the old ruler becomes “sulky,” eventually leaving the school and becoming an isolato, who “will have no one near him but Nature herself” (“and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets”). His final fate has already been described: the crippling, the blindness, the feebleness of senility. As for the schools consisting of young males, they do indeed resemble their human counterparts, “a mob of young collegians… full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard.” These schools dissolve when the collegians become old enough to go off in search of harems. Comparing the two types of whale-school, Ishmael finds that the males will ignore a stricken fellow, but if you “strike a member of the harem school… her companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.” As with humans, the female is a more social animal than the male. Sociality without protection produces no isolatoes, but it can produce extra corpses.

Ishmael offers two more observations on piracy. The first concerns legal piracy. What happens if a whale killed by one ship gets loose in a storm, floats away, and another ship salvages it? American whalers have set down a pair of simple rules: A “Fast-Fish” (one tied to a ship) belongs to the party possessing it; a “Loose-Fish” belongs to “anybody who can soonest catch it.” As with all simple legal codes (as, for example, the Golden Rule, also consisting of two parts), its brevity “necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it,” to account for special cases, the vast variety of circumstances. In all this “will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence,” namely that possession is “half of the law” and often “the whole of the law.” The mansion of the criminal, the financier’s usury, the income of the clergyman of a poor congregation, the holdings of aristocrats, Ireland in relation to England, “that redoubted harpooneer”: What are all of these but Fast-Fish? And what was America in 1492, Poland to the Czar, Greece to the Turk, India to England, Mexico to the United States, if not Loose-Fish? More, “What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?”—up for grabs among political and military pirates. Or “all men’s minds and opinions,” including “the principle of religious belief in them” and “the thoughts of thinkers” to rhetoricians and sophists but Loose-Fish? Or the world? “And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?”—at times up for the taking, at other times a slave. English royals who by law claim title to the most valuable parts of every whale and even every sturgeon captured by English ships exemplify a sovereign piracy, but piracy itself is universal.

For his final observation on piracy, Ishmael introduces the Rose-Bud, a French ship which had acquired a dead whale harpooned and then lost by the Pequod‘s crew, under the Loose-Fish doctrine. France, a home of the Enlightenment critique of religion, of modern statism, of the Rights of Man, of monarchy (at this time, and for twenty years more), and finally of Romance (Rose-Bud “was the romantic name of this aromatic ship,” stinking of rotting whale-flesh), remains a land-power, inexperienced in whaling. The French are also inexperienced when it comes to Yankee bargaining. Mr. Stubb suspects that there may be ambergris in that whale-head; he talks the French captain into cutting it loose—something the French crew does quite happily, given the smell. The French go on their way, and Stubb harvests the ambergris, prize of his “unrighteous cunning” or verbal piracy. While “this most fragrant ambergris” accumulates in “the heart of such decay,” Ishmael finds no wonder in that, given that “saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory.” Having reduced the principle of grace to a principle of nature, Ishmael makes his own redemptive observation: “The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor.” Nor are whale-men. But to see more of that, piracy would need to decline, and under at least most possible regimes, and to some degree in all of them, the modern state tends only to replace one kind of piracy with another.

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

 

Ishmael has shown how a man might prudently choose to mark out and preserve his inner core within the pantheist chaos. This would make him a more tranquil isolato, but still an isolato—one of Tocqueville’s “individualists,” living precariously because alone. In the next ten chapters, he shows how such men might cooperate with like men. The sequence leads up to the Pequod‘s first encounter with a foreign whale ship, an encounter that tests whether such tentative sociality might extend to other nations, other regimes.

Ishmael had already established a friendship with Queequeg, and readers have seen the soundness of his choice. During the operation of stripping blubber from the whale, Queequeg stood on the corpse’s slippery back, attached to Ishmael, who remained on deck, by the “monkey-rope,” tied to the belt of each man. As the stripping proceeded, waves jostled the corpse against the side of the ship; Ishmael’s task was to steady his friend, to prevent him from falling and being crushed. He had every reason to take care, quite apart from bond of friendship, for if Queequeg slid off he would pull Ishmael overboard. Unique to the Pequod, the notion of the monkey-rope arose in the fertile mind of Stubb, who calculated that such a device would ensure vigilance in the man on deck by appealing to the low but solid ground of self-preservation.

Although far from incognizant of this point, Ishmael also recalled their ‘marriage’ (now indeed “for better or for worse”) and further compared their pairing to Siamese twin-ship. More, “So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.” Unjust as this interdependence might be, it precluded any thoughts of isolation, whether terrifying or tranquil. And as a matter of fact, he saw, “this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes”: “If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.” There are no real isolatoes. Self-government of the human soul can be established, but self-government in action requires alert cooperation. “Handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I could, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.”

Chaos remained the enemy of all this, as the sharks continued to swarm around the corpse “like bees round… a beehive.” Fellow-harpooneers Tashtego and Daggoo attempted to kill as many of them as possible with their whale-spades, and while “they meant Queequeg’s best happiness,” the “indiscreet spades” they wielded “would come nearer to amputating a leg than a tail.” Is Queequeg “not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle, and peril, poor lad.” Sentiment alone cannot meet the dangers of chaos; the best friends need to bring observation, prudence, and skill with it. Ishmael ends his reflection on friendship with a glance at the other extreme of ineffectual sentiment. When cold and exhausted Queequeg returns safely to the deck, the hapless Dough-boy offers him a ginger drink, provided to the crew by teetotaling Aunt Charity, back in Nantucket. This earns a sharp reproof from Stubb, who sensibly orders grog for the man, instead. Charity, yes; foolish, Christian-temperance charity, no.

With the Sperm Whale’s head still attached to one side of the ship, Ahab ordered the crew to chase and kill a Right Whale and to tie it to the Pequod‘s other side, for balance. Flask told Stubb that he overheard Fedallah recommending this, and this moved the Second Mate to call the Parsee “the devil in disguise.” Ahab has made a deal with the devil, Stubb feared, blaming God for allowing the devil to prowl the earth, “kidnapping people.” However this may be, the Ahab-Fedallah twin-ship forms a shadow-parallel with the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg. And in a way literally so: Fedallah stood at the edge of the deck, looking at the Right Whale’s head and evidently finding an analogy between its wrinkles and the lines on his hand—that is, his fate. By chance, Ahab stood nearby at such an angle that “the Parsee occupied his shadow,” blending with it and making it longer. The superstitious crew continued its work, but “Laplandish speculations were bandied among them”; pantheists, animists, ruled by a shaman, the ancient Laplanders parallel the modern whale-ship crew, cutting up a whale in the middle of the ocean. Ishmael considers the two whale-heads in a different, more reasonable light. “By the counterpoise of both heads,” the Pequod “regained her even keel, though sorely strained”; “so, when on one side you hoist Locke’s head”—emblem of empiricism—”you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s”—emblem of idealism—”and you come back again; but in a very poor plight.” “Some minds for ever keep trimming boat,” but the better way is to “throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right.” When it comes to guiding your way of life, contradictory philosophic doctrines, even if balanced, cannot substitute for prudential judgment gained by experience.

Denigration of philosophic doctrine does not preclude philosophizing. Ishmael embarks on a brief voyage into what philosophers call the ‘other minds’ problem, a problem that he has already addressed in his observations of the many different human regimes or ways of life. Themselves effectively linked by the ship, the pair of whale-heads merit consideration along with paired Ishmael and Queequeg, Ahab and Fedallah. Both whale species have eyes on the sides of their heads, which gives them two ‘fronts’ and two ‘backs,’ reminiscent of Rome’s Janus, god of doorways. This requires a whale’s brain to be “much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s,” one whereby “he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction.” These intellectual virtues notwithstanding, wall-eyed whales find themselves in a dilemma when attacked by whale-boats coming at them from several directions at once, circumstances in which their perceptions cause them “queer frights” and “helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.”

If the eye is a portal of thoughts, the ear is a portal of beliefs. The ears of both species are tiny; whales think, but do they believe? Sometimes worshipped by the likes of the crazed Shaker, they do not themselves worship. But, Ishmael remarks, the size of eyes and ears does not necessarily make vision or hearing more or less acute. He offers both a philosophic and a sermon-like lesson to members of his own species: “Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.” Then as now, educators lauded breadth of vision, all-inclusive panorama-ism of thought and sentiment. For all his wide-ranging adventures, Melville’s Ishmael prefers careful and precise thought to eclecticism intellectual or moral.

And so he supplements these comparisons with contrasts. If “the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman war-chariot”—the face of Janus that looks back to the virtues of Roman aristocracy—”the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe,” likened by “an old Dutch voyager” to “a shoemaker’s last”—product and tool, respectively, of the modern commercial republic. This makes the Kant-and-Locke joke more precise; the more telling contrast remains that between aristocratic nobility and democratic embourgeoisement. Indeed, despite similarities shared by all members of the genus, “the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads”: “in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm”—a lack of manly fertility; “no ivory teeth at all”—nothing rare and valuable; “no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw”—betokening a warrior-spirit—but rather a mouth fitted for skimming and straining the tiny brit, the steady but unheroic gains of commercial life. The Sperm Whale’s head even hints of philosophy, its broad brow “full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death,” its “whole head seem[ing] to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death.” Even granted the utmost nobility, the “very sulky-looking fellow,” the Right Whale, “I take to have been a Stoic.” But the Sperm Whale more resembles a “Platonian,” a man of more elevated thinking, although he “might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years,” in what one guesses to have been a move toward materialist pantheism.

But what does the Sperm Whale’s head do, when the whale moves from thought to action? In addition to devouring giant squid, it rams ships. “A dead, blind, wall,” an “enormous boneless mass” of extraordinarily tough blubber, the front of its head makes a fearsome battering-ram. “Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall… there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life,” “all obedient to one volition.” This being so, Ishmael tells his listeners, renounce “all ignorant incredulity” regarding the Sperm Whale (emphasis added). Even as he attacks what he takes to be ignorant credulity, religiosity, Ishmael equally attacks the naïve refusal to accept reality as it is. “For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.” “What,” he asks in his rhetorical clincher, “befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Sais?” The goddess in question, Isis, symbolizes nature; she is veiled because nature has secrets. “I am all that has been and is and shall be,” the inscription at the base of her statue tells its readers, echoing the meaning of a name of  God. “No mortal has ever lifted my veil,” she warns—any more than any can see God, unveiled, and live. Ishmael has met the youth in question by reading a poem by Friedrich Schiller, telling the story of a young quester after knowledge who does lift Isis’ veil one Egyptian night, only to be found “extended, senseless, pale as death” the following morning. “Truth attained will never reward the one who unveils it,” Schiller concludes. Isis is another manifestation of the Sphinx; both represent not God but chaos-nature, terrifying as the Biblical God but, in Ishmael’s estimation, impersonal, a combination of fatality and chance, with a weak, faltering humanity making its often-foolish choices, easily swept away. And as for the youth, Ishmael, he must learn how to recover from the experience of learning the truth, having lifted the provincial and sentimental veils or conventions of his own regime. Can the “Young America” bear the truth of his witness?

The move away from social isolation, coupled with the move toward philosophy, suggests a move toward ‘Germany’—by the mid-nineteenth century home to the most celebrated philosophic critics of empiricist, ‘English’ materialism and individualism. The four chapters leading up to the next gam feature increasingly prominent references to German things and themes. The first such reference, “The Great Heidelberg Tun,” refers to a giant wine cask that Ishmael compares to the upper part of the interior of the Sperm Whale’s head. This contains substances more valuable than most German wines: The lower part, the “junk,” consists of “one immense honeycomb of oil”; the upper part, the “case,” contains the spermaceti— “absolutely pure, limpid, odiferous,” and, it might be added, white. This “Tun” must be tapped carefully, “lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents.” Still again, Queequeg intervened heroically in the work of the ship, rescuing Tashtego, assigned to tap the cask, who slipped and fell into the huge cavity after nearly completing his task. Ishmael describes this as an act of “obstetrics,” a lesson in “midwifery.” Midwifery recalls the work of Socrates, whose philosophic way of life consisted not in elaborating a doctrine or ‘system’ (rather in the manner Germans tended to do) but to test or scrutinize the opinions of his fellow-citizens by engaging them in dialectical questioning, an exercise in logos or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, often ending not in the unveiling of truth but in aporia. Queequeg’s salvific action may thus be seen as a picture of Socratism. Had the cask still been loaded with the spermaceti, Tashtego would have drowned, “coffined, hearsed and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.” “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honeyed head, and sweetly perished there?” Here is another sanctuary or “inner Tahiti,” even in Leviathan itself—in this ‘case’ both sweet and fatal, not protective. Rejecting ‘Jerusalem’ even as he endorses the Biblical account of the terrifying, overwhelming cosmos described in the Book of Job, Ishmael also rejects ‘Athens’ insofar as it features philosophers like Plato who offer (or seem to offer) a philosophic doctrine. Midwife Socrates may well be another matter, however. The philosopher who converses with all manner of men and boys in the agora, long-lived and courageous, an Ishmael-like outsider even as he stays inside the walls of his city, could not be described as a doctrinaire. Whether German philosophers lived up to Socrates’ example may be doubted, as Ishmael’s reference to Kant suggests.

The following pair of chapters satirize science, specifically the “semi-sciences” of physiognomy and phrenology. In “The Prairie” (the title recalling the “prairie-like placidity of the Sperm Whale’s brow, bespeaking indifference to death), Melville delves into physiognomy. Sperm Whales don’t have noses, no facial protruberance easily pulled by demeaning jesters. Far from it: “Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees,” with the legend “God: done this day by my hand.” The Sperm Whale’s “sublime” brow gives the animal a “high and mighty god-like dignity”; viewing it, “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature,” or, as a physiognomist would say, “the mark of genius.” Continuing the joke, Ishmael intones, if you doubt the genius of the Sperm Whale, given his failure ever to write a book or to deliver a speech, why, “his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it,” in his “pyramidical silence.” He concludes, more prosaically, “Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a human fable.” Again rather like Socrates, Ishmael doubts the science of his day.

Going behind the whale’s face, and on to the semi-science of phrenology, Ishmael locates its surprisingly small brain inside the monster’s skull; indeed, “the most exalted potency” may well prove brain-weak. But consider further: “If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarf skulls, all bearing rudimentary resemblance to the skull proper.” Now, “it is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls,” and indeed a cannibal friend (presumably Queequeg) had observed much the same thing in the skeleton of a slain enemy. What is more, “I believe that much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone,” as in the expression, ‘He has backbone.’ And as a matter of fact, the whale’s backbone is big and wide—not to mention its hump, an “organ of firmness and indomitableness.” And indeed “the great monster is indomitable,” as “you will yet have reason to know.” Q. E. D., my listeners! The Germans would be proud.

All this Germanism leads to a gam with the Jungfrau, a whale ship out of Bremen. She was a virgin, indeed, having caught no whales and having no sightings of Moby-Dick. Captain Derick de Deer pulled his whale-boat alongside the Pequod with a request for some fish oil; he and his crew had yet to capture a fish of any kind at all. Celebrated as philosophic doctrinaires, the Germans are newcomers to the vast sea of experience, novices at self-government in chaos. As chance would have it, a whale pod was sighted, followed distantly by an old and feeble bull whale, slowed not only by age but by many injuries. The crews of the two ships competed in the pursuit of this shadow of the great leviathan described in Job, which “laugheth at the shaking of a spear.” But “Oh! that unfulfillments should follow the prophets”: Leviathan can indeed be killed by men.

Predictably, the Pequod‘s crew gets to him, first. There is no pity for this pitiable beast, who turns out to be blind, as well. “For all his old age, and his one arm [he had lost a fin in some underwater fight, long ago], he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness to all.” It did get revenge of sorts; the crew tied it to the side of the ship, only to be forced to cut it loose (as usual, Queequeg takes this sensible, decisive action); its sheer weight threatened to drag the ship underwater. As for the Virgin, her captain and crew were last seen lowering the boats to chase a Fin-Back whale, a species too speedy to catch. Germans lack the judgment that comes from experience, but “Oh! many are the Fin-backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.” If the Germans have rightly questioned the individualism of the English, of the Enlightenment generally, they may have hurried off in the wrong direction, on an illusory quest of their own. This gam, this dialogue, has conducted them into an aporia without the dialectical advantage of having discarded illogical half-truths. They will never catch a fish that way, and will continue to beg others for the oil that produces light.