This is the eleventh of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
The next gam will return the Pequod and its crew to a glimpse of the American regime in the form of the Bachelor, its crew gladly heading back to Nantucket, loaded with sperm oil and intent on partying all the way back. The chapters leading up to this encounter will (to understate the matter) present a contrast to that spirit of festive superficiality.
Ishmael begins by continuing his anatomization of the Sperm Whale, digging down to its “ultimatum,” the skeleton. “Since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale,” but on a later voyage Ishmael saw a rare, nearly complete skeleton on the island of Tranque (today’s Malaita) in the Solomon Islands. Ishmael uses the French name, Arsacides, which means Island of the Assassins; many French and English missionaries had been killed there, and likely eaten, too. No evangelist, Ishmael was safe, having befriended the king, who had collected the skeleton after a whale washed ashore, dead, during a typhoon. He housed it in a temple; the local priests tended it, worshipping it as a god. There is no suggestion that Ishmael’s “royal friend” thinks of it as such. The Solomon-Island king has none of the reverence of Solomon, although he may have some of his practical wisdom.
But the whale skeleton is a god, in its own way. Vines have grown under and through it; “the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures…. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.” This recalls the fate-imagery of the loom worked by Queequeg and Ishmael on the Pequod‘s voyage, but the greater weaver never speaks, and answers no questions. “The weaver-god, he weaves, and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.” Ishmael warns his listeners to be careful, “for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar”—the closest readers will come to an explanation of why Ishmael seems to hear not only the speeches of his officers and fellow crewmen, but their whispers and even their thoughts. Somehow, he has escaped the din of the loom, without dying. This Ishmael is an even more thorough exile than his namesake, an observer of the cosmos, outside even while in it—a bit of a philosopher, that way.
The vines and the skeleton: “Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.” When the priests objected to Ishmael’s efforts at obtaining precise measurements of their god, they fell into disputes amongst themselves, enabling him to complete his work without further disturbance. It is a picture of the effects of religious disputation, and although Ishmael dismisses scientific systems as another form of myth, as always he takes the measure of concrete things—a politic if not necessarily a political philosopher, taking advantage of the foolish disputations of priests. Seventy-two feet long, the skeleton would have stretched some ninety feet when the monster was alive; more than a third of the skeleton consists of the skull and jaw. The skeleton resembled “the embryo hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks”; hunted and hunter resemble one another, and at times their roles reverse. But the skeleton proves a disappointment, finally, as it was “by no means the mold of [the whale’] invested form,” covered in life as it is with vast bulks of cartilage, muscle, fat, spermaceti. “How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes [no part of the skeleton]; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.” Although the great spine resembles Pompey’s Pillar or a Gothic spire—monuments of triumph and of worship, of reaching to the heavens—”some little cannibal urchins, the priests’ children”—had stolen the smaller vertebrae for their games of marbles. “Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at least into simple child’s play.” And how children of reverent fathers may think of the gods of their fathers.
From the present, Ishmael takes his investigation to the past, the “antediluvian point of view” afforded by examination of whale fossils. In having him do so, Melville has him deliver an apologia for the novel: “In the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and such throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” Considering the Flood, for example, returns Ishmael to “Saturn’s grey chaos,” to the ice ages, when “the whole world was the whale’s,” then “king of creation.” and thus outranking man in Ishmael’s unbiblical vision. (And even in Biblical terms, there was a time before Man’s creation, in which the whale might indeed have ruled the world.) “I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.” Comprehensive, indeed: godlike, though quite impersonal.
Past, present, and to come: Ishmael’s third discussion of the whale looks to the future and dismisses accounts by authorities of the past. Some claim that modern whales are smaller than the ancient species, and that fewer whales exist now than in antiquity. Ishmael denies both claims. The physical evidence suggests that whales are now bigger, despite accounts by Pliny and other ancient writers. Nor are they less numerous; it’s harder to hunt whales than it is to hunt the nearly-exterminated American bison. “For all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality”—immortal as a god, but not as an individual god. The Arsacidian cannibal priests are on to something, but too particular in their worship.
Ahab had incorporated part of an ivory skeleton into his person. Returning to the Pequod‘s deck from the Samuel Enderby, he damaged the leg; it needed replacing. At this point, Ishmael reveals the reason for Ahab’s mysterious delay in appearing on-deck in the initial weeks of the voyage. Shortly before sailing from Nantucket, Ahab was found lying on the ground at night, unconscious, his ivory leg displaced and nearly piercing his groin; he was cured of his injury only with “extreme difficulty.” “That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary reclusiveness.” His small circle of acquaintances on-shore invested this “hinted casualty…with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails,” and “conspired…to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others.” Fedallah and the Manilan tigers were equally secretive and not at all entirely so underived; a reader might speculate that they bear some responsibility for the direful mishap. Is Ahab’s rumored ‘deal with the devil’ (suggested by down-to-earth Stubb) the result of what amounts to a physical and spiritual protection racket? Ahab himself thinks of such matters as a great-souled man, perverted, might: “While even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them…at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an arch-angelic grandeur” derive from “the sourceless primogenitures of the gods,” the Saturn-world. “The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.” Readers see yet again the affinity of outlook between Ahab and Ishmael, his chronicler, who concludes, “let the unseen, ambiguous synod of the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he called a carpenter.” That sounds very much like one of Ishmael’s calling-down-to earth deflations of metaphysical portents, except that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows as Ishmael has already recalled, was a carpenter. What manner of man will the ship’s carpenter prove?
The carpenter proved omnicompetent in repair work, but also “unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious”—that is, he undertook projects proposed by the sailors, however odd the jobs may be. In this, he did rather resemble Jesus, the supreme Repairer of any and all who come to Him. But unlike Jesus, this carpenter was a stolid man, “with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, at one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world,” an ignorer of persons. “He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.” If a sort of Creator-Repairer of his creation, he resembled the god of Ishmael’s world, not the Bible’s, with an “unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes…talking all the time to keep himself awake.” Ishmael’s cosmic weaver, whether personified or not, parodies the solitary God of the Bible.
To make his new leg, Ahab employed both the carpenter and the blacksmith. The blacksmith set to work on the buckle-screw, forged with fire. Ahab approved, observing that fire animated man in the Promethean myth. To Ahab, to Fedallah and the Manilans, life is fire, and they are would-be spirits of the air, free spirits.
As for the carpenter, Ahab engaged him in dialogue. “I dare say thou callest thyself a good workmanlike workman, eh?” If so, can you drive away my sensation of the ‘phantom limb’? “Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?”—as the New Testament testifies of Jesus. The carpenter, stolid creator within a cosmos that answers no questions, merely asked if the ‘phantom limb’ story is true. Assuring him that it is, Ahab pressed on: “How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?” In the gospel according to Ahab, the existence of a soul is an unlifted curse: “If I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!” His laugh is sardonic because Ahab seethed at the thought of needing another being—God or neighbor— for redemption. “Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” Wealthy, he nonetheless saw that he “owes for the flesh in the tongue I brag with.” He wished he could “get a crucible, and [go] into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra”—a compact, self-sufficient piece of whale-ivory, and thus like the god of the Arsacidians. Ahab hated Jesus for two things: He hated the God of the Bible because He prevented him from being a fiery air-spirit, free to fly; he hated God also for creating him, thereby incurring a debt, preventing his self-sufficiency. The remedies he sought—demonic freedom and a sort of ‘crucifixion’ that would condense him into a piece of the lifeless, ivory part of the god that is the cosmos, a piece both tiny and “compendious”—flatly contradict themselves, unless the crucifixion proves the gateway to liberation. But only the God of the Bible can effect that. Or is it rather that Ahab wants to become like his leg, dead and unfeeling, relieved of all sorrows and pain? But that doesn’t solve the problem of the phantom limb, the question of the soul.
Ishmael immediately moves to show how Ahab’s rebellious-tyrannical soul ruled in his regime. As the ship neared the whale-rich seas near Formosa, the sperm-oil casks stowed in the hull began to leak. When First Mate Starbuck asked the Captain for permission to pull the casks up with heavy-duty block and tackle and repair the damaged ones, Ahab characteristically related it all to himself. “Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself!” But what will the owners say, Starbuck asked—as he hoped, rhetorically. He provoked a tyrannical riposte: “Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel.” Entreatingly, Starbuck said he wanted the two of them “to understand each other better than hitherto,” but the tyrant recurred to force, threatening him with a musket, ordering him back on deck. No coward, Starbuck governed his temper, got up from the cabin chair “half calmly,” and concluded the conversation. “Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab.” Alone, Ahab noted that brave Starbuck “nevertheless obeys”—”a most careful bravery, that!” But he also acknowledged to himself that “there’s something there” in the First Mate’s admonition. He followed Starbuck on deck, and made an equally telling, double-edged remark to him: “Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck.” Relenting, Ahab commanded that the casks be lifted. Ishmael, whose knowledge of men’s thoughts seems to come and go, offers two possible explanations for Ahab’s reversal: “It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or a mere prudential policy,” given the urgency of his own mission and his need to avoid any rebellion on board, however remote that possibility may be.
The sailors excavated cask after cask. Queequeg developed a fever caused by “crawling around amid that dampness and slime.” Near death, he too had a request for the carpenter: to build a canoe, so that his body may be placed in it and set adrift, in the way of warriors’ funerals on his native island. He got out of his sickbed long enough to try out the canoe-coffin, which he found satisfactory. Pip hovered nearby, calling himself a coward, Queequeg a general. And if Queequeg reached the Antilles, would he please seek out Pip—who, Pip knew, was lost at sea. But Queequeg wouldn’t be going anywhere; he recovered as suddenly as he had fallen ill, claiming that he willed himself to live, having recalled some duty on-shore. “Mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.” The coffin became his sea-chest, which he marked with same figures and drawings with which he’d been tattooed by “a departed prophet and seer on his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” in a script Queequeg himself could not read. And so the theory and the treatise alike would perish with him, “unsolved to the last.” Ahab considered him one morning. Never one to overlook yet another source of self-torment, he exclaimed, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”—those beings who reveal their secrets in signs no man can comprehend, beyond the prophet who receives the revelations.
The Pequod entered the South Sea, Ishmael’s dreamed-of destination. “This mysterious divine Pacific zones the whole world about, makes all coasts bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.” Pan-like, it also seemed an Arcadia of the water, full of the pleasures of music and nymphs. “But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain” in “that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.” He turned next to the blacksmith, with his “patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.” No Biblical echoes in him: It was Hephaestus who made weapons for the Olympians before being flung by Zeus from the heavens into the ocean. The same thing happened to blacksmith Perth. On land he had enjoyed a happy home, but met with a double assault from the fates: first, his home was emptied by a burglar whom he “himself did ignorantly conduct” into it. “It was the Bottle Conjuror!”—alcoholic drink, to be sure, but also a reference to a hoax in a London theater in 1749, in which a crowd paid to see a magician place himself into a quart bottle, only to be disappointed. Ahab had wished to perform a similar trick of self-concentration, equally impossible. (Hephaestus too suffered a delusion, marrying seductive Aphrodite only to be cuckolded by warlike Ares.) The blacksmith never regained his prosperity; his older brother died, leaving him with crushing additional responsibilities. Eventually, his wife and two of their children also died. “The houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape.” But like Hephaestus, instead he went to sea; “the all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful new-life adventures.” He is deceived again, but this time by the beckoning mermaids, who promise marriage but only after death.
Ahab met Perth’s patience with impatience. “How can’st thou endure without being mad?” But although he could face agonies imposed by the fates and even by himself, even this blacksmith couldn’t smooth the creases on the Captain’s brow, what Ahab took to be the birth-mark on the brow of man, incised by cruel gods. Perth could obey his captain’s orders, making him a harpoon out of hardest steel, the kind used for the nails in the hooves of race horses. Once the harpoon was forged, Ahab insisted on finishing the job himself, as Fedallah gazed at the flame. Ahab had the finished harpoon tempered with the blood of the pagan harpooneers “in the name of the devil.” The pole was hickory, the hardest American hardwood; new tow-line was braided for the rope. “This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon,” his “delirious” howls mocked by the “wretched laugh” of mocking Pip. Are the three Fates to doom Moby-Dick, or will they entwine Ahab?
If ivory stands for the lifeless framework of the cosmos, steel for the lifeless thing that kills life, the gold of the sunset on the peaceful Pacific stands for life, giving the ocean the appearance of a “rolling prairie” full of flowers and tall grasses. “All this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,and form one seamless whole.” “However temporary,” the effects of “such soothing scenes,” they moderated Ahab—the sunlight’s “golden keys” opening “his own secret golden treasuries,” until “his breath upon them prove[d] but tarnishing.” “Would to God these blessed calms would last,” Ishmael mused, but, as the weaver-god would have it, “the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.” There is no progress. In this, Ishmael departs from the optimistic historicism of his century and the next. “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” Nowhere: “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” As before the other golden thing, the doubloon, Starbuck and Stubb found in the glittering Pacific at sunset a reflection of their own souls. Starbuck piously murmured, “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” But one can’t really look deep down into water that reflects the sunlight. Stubb also stayed on the surface, in his own less meditative way. “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!”
And so to the gam with the Bachelor, her whole crew jolly as Stubb. She was an American ship, out of Nantucket, heading home a “glad ship of good luck,” loaded down with casks of sperm oil, its crew dancing with Polynesian girls, all watched over by their jovial, Pan-like captain, who invited Ahab aboard with glass and bottle aloft. To Ahab’s “gritted” query about the White Whale, the ‘Pan’ happily replied, “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all.” Hoping for some sign of darkness, Ahab asked if he’d lost any men. “Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all,” ‘Pan’ blithely replied. If Ahab will but come aboard and join the party, “I’ll soon take that black from your brow,” that hitherto ineffaceable birth-mark from the gods. Judging him a fool, which in many respects his counterpart surely is, Ahab told him, “Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst” [perhaps disaster might yet strike them down]; well, call me an empty ship, and outward bound.” This is the only other “call me” command spoken in the yarn, echoing Ishmael’s original. In both cases, they are spoken by a self-understood outcast, and in both cases spoken accurately. “So go thy ways, and I will mine,” Ahab bids—his way against the gentle breeze, the Bachelor‘s ways with it. Reminded of the home toward which the opposite ship was bound, Ahab took a small vial filled with sand, Nantucket sand, the land on which his young wife awaited him. But unlike his pipe, which he disdainfully pitched into the sea because it gave him pleasure, Ahab didn’t empty the vial and throw it away. He did indeed have his humanities.
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