This is the fifth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
If the palsied universe lies before us like a leper, what shall we do? What way of life, what regime, should human beings follow?
Democracy would be one. The principle of democracy is equality, and if we all are equally illumined not by the light of the Gospels, nor that of the Enlightenment, but by the colorless, all-color of atheism, no one, no few, among us deserves to rule the others. Such pretensions belong among the pretensions Nature paints, in painting herself like a harlot. Nor should democrats be dismissed as entirely ignorant. They hear things. If they are beneath some in civil society, this does keep their ears to the ground, or in this instance the deck. A sailor believes he’s heard something below the deck of the Pequod, something or someone not yet seen on deck. He does not know what or who it is, and the crew both discounts his opinion and passes it around. (Readers know he heard the mysterious stowaways; Melville titles the chapter “Hark!” but the herald angels aren’t singing.) Democrats hear things, even if they might not immediately know what they are. Ishmael never suggests that the officers have heard anything below-deck. Superior rank makes rule easier in one way, harder in another.
Tyranny is another way of life, represented in Ahab. Ishmael shows him poring over his sea charts, calculating where Moby-Dick might most likely be found, given the known, regular migrations of sperm whales—their ‘fatedness.’ This instances the way in which Ahab’s intellect serves his ruling passion, “threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of the monomaniac thought of his soul,” forming a “delirious but still methodical scheme.” In the meantime (and here chance might intervene amidst the workings of fatality and the human will) Moby-Dick might turn up anywhere, long before the ship reaches the most likely hunting ground; Ahab will keep the crew vigilant. As for himself, he remains superficially rational but tormented, awakening from fitful sleep with “his own bloody nails in his palms,” self-crucified. The “hell in himself” drives him from his state room to pace every part of the deck. The “eternal, living principle or soul in him,” his heart, in a state of “horror” at the underlying ‘nature of nature,’ conflicts with his mind, whose “sheer inveteracy of will” drives him to confront and attempt to destroy that nature. More, his heart is “horror-stricken” by the very mind that sets his purpose. His “tormented spirit” may be “a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.” “God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.” Rarely does skeptical Ishmael go so far as to appeal to God, but he sees the whiteness of the whale, a “blankness,” in the soul of his captain, and doubts that any human word or deed can help him, or the regime he has founded. Ahab’s tyranny is contra natura in two ways: against what he takes to be the malicious underlying nature of nature; against his own soul, his life-principle.
Ishmael admits that Ahab does understand something about nature. In another of his ‘down-to-earth’ chapters, he testifies to the fact that Moby-Dick, if a prodigy, nonetheless has had predecessors for elusiveness and ferocity among the sperm whale species. Ishmael protests that his yarn is no “monstrous fable, or worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Sperm whales have indeed attacked whaling boats and ships, but land-dwellers seldom hear of these incidents and have little comprehension of the “powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious” character of the monster, which “acts not so often with blind rage, as with willful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers,” behavior attested to as early as the sixth-century historian Procopius of Constantinople. Wise Solomon was right: “Verily there is nothing new under the sun.” Deploying understatement to drive home the plausibility of what he reports, Ishmael writes, “I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.”
His own credibility (and not incidentally, his own sanity) confirmed, Ishmael returns to the mind of the tyrant, whose rationality of method entails not only calculations concerning the Whale but ruling calculations concerning his officers and crew. “To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” Although for the moment Ahab has lodged “his magnet in Starbuck’s brain,” he knows that the soul of First Mate Starbuck “abhorred his captain’s quest,” and might challenge his rule; the conflict between mind and life-principle or soul which torments Ahab also torments Starbuck, thanks to Ahab, but in Starbuck his mindset was not self-generated, and so might slip. More, the length of the voyage might detach the souls of his crew from the regime. He has brought them to a high pitch of excitement and resolution with his demagoguery, but he knows that this mood cannot endure through long months at sea. More, “he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation,” giving his officers and crew a right to revolution, should they so choose. “The subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby-Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested in it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action).” Therefore, action they will have, “some nearer things to think of than Moby-Dick,” “some food for their common, daily appetites”—namely, cash. Even the doubloon will not suffice, here, but rather the continuance of “the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod‘s voyage”— whale-hunting and whale-processing for salable commodities.
The lull before action affords Ishmael an opportunity further to picture his own understanding of the human condition. On deck on the ship in a quiet sea, he and Queequeg weave a sword-mat, a sturdy cloth designed to protect sails and riggings at chafing points. “It seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” The warp (the set of vertical threads, called the “longitude” by weavers) represents necessity or fate; “with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads”—free will and liberty of action. “Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword”—the piece of wood so called, which opens a space in the woof (the horizontal threads or “latitude” of the mat)—”sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly,” represents chance. Longitude and latitude: terms not only of weaving but of mapping; Ishmael and Queequeg’s actions parallel Ahab’s. Their purpose contrasts with his, as protection contrasts with destruction. Against Shelley’s thoroughgoing determinism in “Queen Mab,” Ishmael asserts a limited but still significant role for free will and chance in the workings of fate. Despite his earlier appeal to God, Ishmael leaves no apparent role for providence.
Fate then intervenes. Tashtego sights a school of sperm whales. At this, Ahab is “surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air,” rather like demons in the Bible. These are those whom Ishmael had seen in the dusk, as he walked to board the ship in Nantucket, the ones the sailor heard below deck. They unhitch a fourth whale-boat, which the sailors had assumed to be only a spare; Ahab himself will join the hunt with these confederates. The dominant one, Fedallah, whose name means “in the hands of God” or perhaps “gift of God,” speaks in a serpentine half-hiss; tall, dark-skinned, garbed in black, his head is crowned with the whiteness associated with the whale—long, white hair braided and curled atop his head like a turban. He is a Parsee—that is, a Zoroastrian fire-worshipper whose race once lived in Persia before being driven to India by Muslim persecutors who did not regard Zoroastrians as gifts from God. The Satan-figure’s confreres are Manilans of “tiger-yellow” complexions; Ishmael calls the Filipinos of Manila “a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtlety,” whom “some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil.” While by his irony Ishmael distances himself from such superstition, he does not distance himself from the symbolic significance of Ahab’s chosen close collaborators—a sort of substitute set of officers he has placed at the heart of his usurping regime.
The ship’s formal officers react in accordance with their several characters. Devil-may-care Stubb shouts to his men, “Never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough”; he urges on his rowers with talk of riches in “a tone… strangely compounded of fun and fury.” Starbuck finds relief in the whale-sighting: “This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand!” Flask gets up on Daggoo’s shoulders for a better look at the prey; “the bearer looked nobler than the rider,” as if “Passion and Vanity [were] stamping the living magnanimous earth,” to little effect. On the pursuit, Stubb is cheerful, Starbuck quiet, Flask voluble. As for Ahab, he addresses his boat-crew with “words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.” All set off amidst “the vast swells of the omnipotent sea,” soon roiled by a squall.
In Starbuck’s boat, Ishmael witnesses the interplay of chance, fate, and choice the sword-mat symbolized. Starbuck orders Queequeg to throw the harpoon (ruling choice, chosen obedience), but a wind-swelled wave (chance) jostles the boat, causing the harpoon to miss its target. The storm (fate) intensifies; they lose sight of the other boats and of the ship. Hoping for rescue, Starbuck lights a lantern, which Queequeg holds. “There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.” They don’t find the ship until the fatality of natural necessity brings the dawn.
Melville titles the next chapter of Ishmael’s yarn “The Hyena”—a jarring title in a maritime narrative. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke,” one “at nobody’s expense but his own.” “There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy”—a sort of thoughtful Stubbism. Safely back on ship, Ishmael asks Queequeg whether such near-calamities “did often happen,” and is calmly assured that they do. He asks Starbuck if lowering whale boats in “a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion”; yes, “careful and prudent” Starbuck answers, having “lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.” And you, Flask? “Yes, that’s the law.” Constrained by fate, chance, and custom, Ishmael nonetheless has a choice to make, and so he does. He draws up his last will and testament, with Queequeg serving as “lawyer, executor, and legatee.” And he feels better for doing so; “a stone was rolled away from my heart.” He concludes that “the hyena” is life itself, the cosmos itself, a “laughing hyena”—a jolly beast, but ready to tear you apart. The best an individual can do is to make prudent choices against necessity and mischance, with the help of a trusted friend. Ishmael thus avoids the maddened libido dominandi of the tyrant’s soul, the decent but weak conventionality of Starbuck, the thoughtless bravado of Stubb, the inanity of Flask, and what he judges to be the evangelical or Christian hope of landlubbers who ignore the harshness of reality.
He remains under the rule of Ahab, where this modest morality will do only a little good. In one of his cheerier moments, Stubb marvels to Flask about peg-legged Ahab’s courage at setting off in a whale-boat. “Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!” Never one to miss a chance to exhibit stupidity, Flask observes that it’s not “so strange,” really, because Ahab has “one knee, and good part of the other left.” Stubb ripostes: “I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.” Surely not. Ishmael, who doesn’t pray much, either, instead considers Ahab’s political responsibility: Should the ship’s captain risk his life? The fact that he does, and the fact that he has engaged his own whale-boat crew, “never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod,” nor does it much trouble many of its sailors or its officers.
As for Ahab’s picked crew-mates, Fedallah “remained a muffled mystery to the last,” with “some sort of a half-hinted influence” or “even authority” over the captain. Fedallah “was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams,” “the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities”—”insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal recollections,” memories of a time when “according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men,” and “the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.” If lands untouched by civilization, or by modern notions of progress, no longer produce such remarkable men, the original earth, still preserved in remote places, brings forth ‘Rousseauian’ noble savages like Daggoo, Queequeg, and Tashtego, but also sinister beings like Fedallah, whom Rousseau would have dismissed as unlikely. Melville is a Rousseau for realists.
Such persons thrive on the chaos of the sea. It was primitive men (Tashtego’s ancestors) who first ventured out on it to hunt whales. Fedallah is the first to see the Spirit-Spout, a will-o’-the-wisp whale-spout that vanishes when whaling boats chase it. “And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought in him… two different things were warring,” his live leg and his dead, peg-leg. “On life and death this old man walked.” “There reigned… a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might round on us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.” Savage persons on the savage sea; the more-or-less civilized sailors, split-souled Ahab included, associate the Spirit-Spout with Moby-Dick. They reach the Cape of Good Hope, which Ishmael, lost to hope, calls Cape Tormentosa, for its “demoniac waves.” There they have their first encounter with another whale ship, “The Albatross,” as white as its namesake, “long absent from home.” Ahab tries to hail it, hoping for news on the Whale, but it drifts off, birdlike. In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the albatross is the bird of good omen. Ahab doesn’t kill it, as the Mariner does; for him and his crew, it is simply unreachable.
Ahab commands the helmsman to sail on, “round the world.” Ishmael reflects: “Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.” If the world were “an endless plain,” at least there could be progress, “promise in the voyage.” “But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.” Given the futility of progress on a round globe, where should the ship of state sail? Should it sail at all, or only keep to port?
Recent Comments