This is the seventh of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
Having reintroduced Moby-Dick, Melville devotes the next sixteen chapters to whales and whale-hunting. This pattern—a gam between the Pequod and another whale-ship, followed by yarns of whaling, brief times of peace followed by long periods of war—will prevail for the second half of the book. It follows the refined understanding of the cosmos Ishmael introduced in the middle of his yarn, his suggestion that even chaos features a few safe harbors, a few island havens.
This set of chapters concerns bodies, and how it is the nature of things for bodies to devour bodies. He begins with three chapters on the bodies of whales as depicted in paintings and other visual media. “Such pictures of whales are all wrong”—”pictorial delusions” whose “primal source” or sources may be found among Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek sculpture. Those were “inventive but unscrupulous times” (as Melville has already asserted respecting ancient scriptures), and “ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in the most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of him” drawn by men who were looking at beached whales mutilated and deformed by whatever catastrophes had killed them. A beached whale is the proverbial fish out of water, and so the whole of it as it is in life “must remain unpainted to the last.” “The only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself,” a hazardous expedition; “it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.” Experience is the best way of knowing, but, as Radney’s fate shows, getting close enough for detailed observation risks killing the observer. Among painters, the “less erroneous” efforts have been undertaken by the French generally, Ambroise Louis Garneray in particular. “The French are the lads for painting action,” evidently because they have long been the preeminent military power in Europe. Although Ishmael professes not to know it, Garneray, though never a whaler, served as an officer in the French navy during the Napoleonic Wars. By contrast, industrial and commercial “English and American whale draughtsman seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale.” Regimes enter into the souls of artists as much as they do the souls of whalemen.
Civilization itself may interfere with artists who attempt to capture the whale. The proof is our yarn-spinner, portrayer of whales in words. “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage”—an outsider, an Ishmael. This matters, not necessarily (as one might suppose) because the primal, savage man best understands the primal, savage beast but because “one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry.” With that patience, “the white sailor-savage… will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield” and as “full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old German savage, Albert Dürer.” Ishmael and his maker, Melville, exhibit similar patience, similar barbarity or savagery “so-called,” similar attention to detail. Such men will show you the whale, without endangering your body although perhaps endangering your soul.
As for the whale’s body, the Right Whale nourishes it with brit, tiny crustaceans that live on the surface of the ocean. “Brit” is the chapter containing the middle pages of the book, and in them we learn that “to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling”; Columbus, for example, “sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one.” Such surface-sailing induces the illusion of mastery, seen especially in the modern attempt to conquer nature itself. But “however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.” The illusion of modern science, of the civilization that preens itself on its supposed triumph over savagery, brings men to lose “that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” We overlook what should be an obvious fact: “Noah’s flood has not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.” And that two-thirds of the world devours not only land and landsmen who venture onto it but itself. The sea “is also fiend to its own offspring,” “dash[ing] even the mightiest whales upon the rocks” along with wrecked ships. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it”: Where is God, Ishmael implies, on the ocean? Has He ever moved across the waters of the primeval cosmos? “The masterless ocean overruns the globe.” But more, the ocean’s power finds its match in the ocean’s “subtlety.” “Its most dreaded creatures glide under water.” Like the cosmos itself, its lovely, azure surface hides monsters, and those monsters themselves come in forms of “devilish brilliance and beauty.” Hobbes had it right: a place of “universal cannibalism,” the sea shelters creatures which “prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”
And then consider yourself, know yourself as well as a native of Lima knows his city. “Do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself” in this war of all against all, in and on the sea that surrounds the land? For as “this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti”—one place where desperate captains and their mutinous crewmen alike both find respite—”full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” Who is the God who might preserve you in this Eden within yourself? He does not seem to be on the waters, but He does seem to be (even if only as a metaphor) in the cautionary words of Ishmael’s yarn, words both illustrating and exemplifying the deliberation and choice that can inflect if not master or rule fate and chance. Self-knowledge and consequent self-protection are still possible, even if the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate never really has been and never really will be. Central to Moby-Dick stands this challenge to the Bible and religions generally, and to American, Western, and modern rationalism, along with a classical, ‘ancient,’ and reasonable reply, wrapped though it may be in ‘Romantic’ rhetoric.
One may measure the difference between the Right Whale and the Sperm Whale by noticing that the former eats brit, the latter giant squid. As the Pequod sailed toward Java, the Spirit-Spout occasionally beckoning them on, Daggoo sighted what appeared to be Moby-Dick. It turned out to be a giant squid, basking on the surface. As with its enemy, the Sperm Whale, “few men have any but the most vague ideas concerning [the giant squid’s] true nature and form.” Sailors suppose that it clings to the bottom of the ocean with its giant tentacles, only to be pried loose and devoured by the Sperm Whale which, unlike the Right Whale, has the jaw and the teeth necessary for that task. But it is “only by inference” that “one can tell of what, precisely,” the Sperm Whale’s food consists. Ahab did not care. As soon as the squid was identified, he silently turned his boat back to the ship. Tyrant Ahab plots; he never wonders. Ever-observant, prudent Queequeg matter-of-factly remarked that where you see squid you will see the Sperm Whale.
Ishmael turns next to the business of killing whales. Each harpoon attaches to a “whale-line,” the rope that “folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction” like the deadly snakes draped around Indian jugglers. With a harpooned whale pulling it, the line may entangle a sailor and drag him overboard. This should terrorize the men, “yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?”—enables them to laugh and joke, even as the boat itself “rock[s] like a cradle,” pitching each one from side to side. Ahab understood the power of habit as a tool of everyday ruling; here it faces down the prospect of death. But consider yourself, Ishmael again recommends: “All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.” A philosopher would feel no more or less terror in a whale boat than in a chair before his hearth. The hemorrhage, the embolism, the seizure: just as each human being has his inner Tahiti, so has he his death-dealing, serpentine, inner chaos.
Queequeg was right. They sighted a whale. In the pursuit it dove, surfacing near Stubb’s boat. Ishmael provides a blood-soaked description of the kill, not omitting the whipping of the line in the boat. The whale’s “tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men,” their savage forebears in the whaling life. Stubb ordered the men to pull the whale to the surface, then took a lance and probed for its heart. “At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air”; Stubb’s lance had burst the whale’s heart. All in a day’s work for Stubb, who paused to dump the dead ashes of his pipe into the water, “thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.” It will soon transpire that he contemplated not the cosmos but the prospect of dinner.
The time between the kill and the meal gives Ishmael time to propose a modest reform in whaling practices. Harpooneers are expected not only to hit the whale but to join in rowing the whale-boat. This tires them, contributing to the poor percentage of kills—only five of fifty throws fastens the harpoon firmly on the whale. If the (as it were) spiritual side of Ishmael seeks its inner Tahiti, his practical side aims not at revolution but at reform. For him, given his assessment of nature, modest self-government prevails in thought and action.
Mr. Stubb concerned himself more with eating: brit for Right Whales, Squid for Sperm Whales, Sperm Whales for him. While Ahab viewed the kill with “some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair,” being no nearer to killing Moby-Dick, Stubb, “flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement.” (“Staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management of affairs”—a resignation to which that good man may too readily recur.) Temporarily free of rule by his two superiors, Stubb ordered Daggoo to cut him a steak from the prime section of the whale. He was not the only creature dining with relish, as the sharks swarmed around the carcass, gouging out their own filets. Ishmael sharply observed that sharks follow slave ships, too, devouring the bodies of dead slaves, tossed overboard. For his entertainment before dining, Stubb commanded the ship’s black cook, himself effectively a slave, to deliver a sermon to the sharks, to tell them to quiet their thrashing. Unamused by the command to perform what amounted to a minstrel show for the Second Mate, Christian “Fleece” had no choice but to obey, preaching very much along the lines Ishmael himself thinks. Addressing the sharks as “fellow-critters,” he admitted that their voracity “can’t be helped” because “dat is natur”; perhaps thinking more of Stubb than of the heedless sharks, he added that “to gobern wicked natur, dat is de pint,” since angels themselves are “not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.” And (again thinking of Stubb, who shared his meal with no one) could you not add a bit of charity and justice to your actions? Could the bigger sharks not bite off some of that blubber and feed the smaller ones? Turning directly to Stubb, Fleece announced that it was no use, that sharks “don’t hear one word,” and will feed until their bellies are full—except that their “bellies is bottomless.” This is the one lesson Stubb does take from the designated sermonizer: “Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion,” and so will go to dinner. After listening to several peremptory orders for more whale-meat tomorrow, Fleece judged Stubb to be no better than a shark.
Ishmael concurs, widening the lesson, Montaigne-like, to mankind generally. Just as we are all savages, beneath the civilizational surface, so we are all cannibals. “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.” But why does that make men cannibals, rather than merely voracious?
Ishmael shows why he thinks so as he describes the “laborious” business of later generations of slaughterers decorously would call ‘processing’ the whale. Queequeg and another sailor killed some of the sharks, an effort which “brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe.” Sharks began to devour the bowels of the sharks ripped open by the whale-spades; more, the disemboweled sharks ate their own bowels “till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth.” Here is pantheism, indeed: nature is self-devouring; it cannibalizes itself and derives energy from that very cannibalism. “A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.” No isolatoes in nature, but no sweet pantheism of peace, either: neither Percy Bysshe Shelley nor Ralph Waldo Emerson ever went to sea. Ishmael gives Queequeg the coda, a serious wisecrack: “Queequeg no care what god made him shark”—readers will recall Blake’s “tyger,” the animal to which Fedallah’s crew were compared—”wedder Feejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin”—savage, blood-red, like the faces of the sailors when the sun reflected the bloody water.
Attuned to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the whalemen ignored the Sabbath, working on the whale that Sunday, “every sailor a butcher,” bloodied. The Sabbath separates the day of rest from the days of work, even as the Creator-God of the Bible remains separate from His Creation. But in a pantheistic cosmos no genuine separation exists; one day is like another, distinguished only by the kind of actions undertaken on that day. The upper blubber-layer of the whale is called the “blanket-piece,” and indeed serves to insulate the whale in all hemispheres, and at all depths of the ocean. The blubber came off the corpse like an orange rind. This unforbidden fruit was thrown into the ship’s blubber-room. “Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands kept coiling away the long blanket-pieces as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.” In the pantheistic cosmos, fruit and Serpent are essentially the same thing, things to be ‘processed’ and re-‘processed.’ In the pantheistic chaos, all persons, animals, and things are at least in some measure blood-red dam Ingins.
The Sperm Whale’s thick, dense blubber does act like a blanket “or, better still, an Indian poncho.” “Crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight lines” resembling hieroglyphs, the pattern reminds Ishmael of “those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids” (in Egypt, where God’s people were enslaved) and also “the old Indian characters chiseled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.” “Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.” If God is indeed “a dam Ingin,” His inscrutable actions (whether in making tigers, lambs, or sharks) match the inscrutability of the markings He leaves. His Word is no-word, or at least no word understandable to any person now alive. But the whale also shares with humans lungs and warm blood. The blanket protects “the great monster” from the cold of deep and far-northern waters and the tropical heat. “It does seem to me,” Ishmael testifies, “that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.” “In all seasons retain a temperature of thine own.” Here is the lesson of Fleece’s sermon, heard not by a shark but by a fellow-human. Once again, Ishmael commends defense of the inner Tahiti against chaos. Melville’s contemporary, Nietzsche, would soon call for a pessimism of strength; Melville’s Ishmael already has a (pantheistic) pessimism of strength.
He returns to his account of whaling’s laborious business. The sailors separated the body of the whale from its valuable head, cutting the body loose from the ship and leaving it to drift. It was white, like “a marble sepulcher” and of course like the living death, Moby-Dick. “Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives,” flesh consumed by sea-gulls, “the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled,” examples of the “horrible vulturism of earth from which not the mightiest whale is free.” The whale lived on, however, in the superstitious minds of sailors. Seen from afar by “some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel,” the “whale’s unharming corpse” is often mistaken for a shoal or a rock, the region set down in a log book as a danger zone, avoided for years by other ships, which “leap over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.” Sheep bring Christians to mind, and indeed, Ishmael scornfully exclaims, “There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!” It is a funeral dirge not for the whale but for religion. “Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world”—specifically, the world of those who believe unwittingly false reports carefully written down as well-intended warnings to the flock. Ghostly horror-stories, like idealistic fantasies, like the beautiful surface of the world itself, only mask reality, diverting men from attention to what they most need to know.
Ahab thought of the whale-head as a sphinx. Reversing the legend, it never interrogated him; he interrogated it, or rather entreated and even prayed to it. “Tell us the secret thing that is in thee,” what you have learned, you who have “moved amid this world’s foundations,” the primeval water over which the God of the Bible moved. You have seen not only the foundation of the world but the human beings who have lived and died above it: the drowned sailors; the lovers who jumped from the burning ship; the murder-victims of pirates. “O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham,” the most faithful of the faithful, “and not one syllable is thine!” In the legend, the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle is “Man.” In this more real world, the Sphinx remained silent, giving no answers. Lapsed-Quaker Ahab longed for St. Paul to come, “and to my breezelessness bring his breeze,” the Holy Spirit. “O nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies!”—those parallels between the atomistic material of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the mind of man. In the materialist and pantheist chaos there is no creating Logos, no understandable Word of God. Only silence.
The next gam closes this account of cosmic cannibalism with an ironic answer to Ahab’s prayer. The Sphinx did not speak, but it had a sort of prophet. The crew sighted the Jeroboam, another whale-ship out of Nantucket. The Captain Mayhew refused to board the Pequod, as his own crew suffered from an epidemic. He preferred to converse with Ahab from a whale-boat. The original Jeroboam, the evil king of southern Israel portrayed in I Kings 11-14, has his counterpart not in the captain but in a crazed Shaker who accompanied him on the boat, a man with “deep, settled, fanatic delirium” in his eyes, who has neutralized the legitimate rule of the captain and his officers by terrifying the crew with end-times prophecies. The madman came from the “crazy society of Niskayuna Shakers,” who settled in that upstate New York village in 1774, in order to bring the sect’s founder, Mother Ann Lee, recently arrived from England via New York City, to a safe haven. (Judging from one extant portrait, Mother Lee, it might be noted, had an extraordinarily prominent forehead, rather resembling that of a sperm whale.) At Niskayuna, this man had “announced the speedy opening of the seventh vial” of the Book of Revelation, which was in this case “supposed to be charged with laudanum.” But he soon departed for Nantucket, seized with still another “strange, apostolic whim.” “With that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior,” enabling him to sign on to the whale ship; safely out of sight of land, he “announced himself as the archangel Gabriel [meaning “God is my strength”], guardian angel of Israel and trumpeter of the world’s doom, “command[ing] the captain to jump overboard.” Although the captain disobeyed, he found himself increasingly powerless, as “the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness” and feelings of terror. “Jeroboam” means “the people contend,” and so they did, effectively mutinying, changing the regime of the ship from a monarchy to a popularly-supported tyranny. (The name “Mayhew” might be a sly reference to Jonathan Mayhew, an eminently respectable New England clergyman of the Founding era who blended liberal Christianity with sober Lockeanism, the sort of man who may indeed influence the course of events on stable, dry land but might find himself all at sea, when at sea with a self-proclaimed prophet of God.) The epidemic only increased ‘Gabriel’s’ usurped authority, as he “declar[ed] that the plague, as he so called it” (following Biblical language) “was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.” After proclaiming Moby-Dick to be God, ‘Gabriel’ correctly prophesied the death of the First Mate, who had announced his intention to kill the Whale; this confirmed his authority over the “poor devils,” the crew. From then on, the crew “sometimes render[ed] him personal homage, as to a god,” of whom they begged for mercy. In the Bible, Jeroboam leads Israelites in idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf.
All of which parallels much of Ahab’s own tyranny, From his feigned sanity to gain access to the ship, to his usurpation of the authority of the owners of the Pequod once safely offshore, to his dominance over the officers by mesmeric words of monomaniacal ardor that bring the crew under his tyrannical rule, “Gabriel” does indeed answer Ahab’s prayer by holding a mirror up to him. After hearing Ahab also intends to kill the Whale, he prophesied Ahab’s destruction: “Beware the blasphemer’s end!” “The crazy sea… seemed in league with him”—a just ‘analogy,’ indeed, as ‘Gabriel’ will prove a true prophet not of God but of chaos, even as he ruled superstitious men by means of an idolatrous, self-divinizing cult. The Biblical Jeroboam waged constant war with the house of Judah, the king of Northern Israel. Both Israels finally deviate from the God of the Bible, as indeed the “houses” of the Pequod and the Jeroboam now have done. “Curses throttle thee!” Ahab shrieked in reply. The war of the two false Israels continued.
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