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.
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