This is the fourth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
If the waters of the oceans represent and to some degree embody the chaos surrounding and even underlying the apparent order of the land—if chaos is an inescapable reality—how can that chaos be thought? And what shall, can, human beings do, given it, and as part of it?
In the eleven chapters beginning with “Cetology” and ending with “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael presents several attempts to understand and to deal with this reality. “Cetology” comes immediately after the first mention of the White Whale by Ahab, although we recall that Ishmael had alluded to it near the beginning of his yarn. With characteristic irony, Ishmael presents a taxonomy of whales, a “classification of the constituents of chaos” which he calls “indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.” Because the sperm whale inhabits the remote southern seas, and offers only glimpses of itself above the surface, the two best books on the sperm whale which attempt a “scientific description” of the species offer “necessarily” little information, but Ishmael brushes that aside: “Any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty”; limited human beings weakly comprehend a vastness that changes constantly. This does not preclude some insights, however.
On the question of whether the whale is a mammal or a fish, Ishmael cheerfully chooses to rely on tradition, not Linnaeus, even while immediately observing that the ‘fish’ has lungs, not gills, and warm blood. The real reason for calling the whale a fish is that it lives entirely in the water, the symbol of chaos; to Ishmael’s mind, mammals, including humans, are at most “amphibious,” like the walrus and perhaps the sailor. He defines the whale as “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail,” unlike all other fish “familiar to landsmen”; freshwater fish have vertical tails. Ishmael goes on to list the various kinds of whales, playfully dividing them, first, according to their size and naming their sizes in the same terms used for books: folio, octavo, duodecimo. The analogy is apt: neither a book nor a classification system can really ‘contain’ the vast reality it attempts to describe. “God keep me from completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.” With insights along the way: Regarding the killer whale, Ishmael observes, “We are all killers, on land and sea; Bonaparte and sharks included.” Classifying the constituents of chaos does not tame them, even if it may give human beings a framework, however arbitrary, for making observations that tell.
From science, Ishmael returns to politics, this time not the formal politics of rank but the perhaps more powerful order of custom, which enables rank to endure. Returning to the origins of European whaling, Ishmael recalls that the regime of the old Dutch whaling ships consisted of the captain, who took charge of navigation and general management and the Specksynder (“Fat-cutter”), who governed whale-hunting. On American whalers, the harpooneer is “an important officer on the boat,” even to the point of commanding the ship’s deck on night watches in whaling grounds. For that reason, “the grand maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior, although always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.” Equality in civil society, but rank in terms of custom, custom based on the character of one’s role within the regime.
This notwithstanding, the true ruler of the Pequod remains Ahab. Yet even he “was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea,” although “incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve.” So he must do; given “the sultanism of his brain,” his drive to found an “irresistible dictatorship” aboard the ship will fail if he relies on natural intelligence alone. “Be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base”—necessary “political superstitions.” Indeed, this is one reason why “God’s true princes of the Empire”—men like Bulkington—fail to ascend to the heights of command. A dolt may rule an empire because “the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization” of authority seen in a mere crown. When a man like Ahab takes the helm—one who, far from being a dolt, understands the use of custom or convention—the people will obey.
Ishmael shows how this works by describing the ritual of dining at the Captain’s cabin-table. Each officer must, according to “holy usage,” report to the cabin after the higher-ranking officer has had time to be seated and all eat in silence. (“Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, [Ahab] was still an alien in it,” socially “inaccessible” even at table). When the officers leave, the harpooneers dine rather more informally, in an “almost frantic democracy” of gobbling and chatter. But democracy establishes its own hierarchy; the men take their amusement by intimidating the cabin boy; “hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals.”
Formal office and informal usage or custom reinforce any regime. To them rulers typically add architecture. Mast-heads embody authority, literally towering over the crew. Ishmael sketches a history of ‘mast-heads’ defined broadly as any elevated structure that either enables surveillance or forces onlookers to bend their heads upward, beginning with the pyramids of Egypt and including statues of George Washington and other dignitaries. On the whaling ship, however, elevation often induces neither vigilance nor awe but freedom from the captain’s orders (how can he tell if you really are looking out for whale, or just daydreaming?). Although “very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient ‘interest’ in the voyage,” they remain out of reach, “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie” by “the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.” In a word, the young sentry finds not whales but pantheism, an insight falsified not so much by the captain’s wrath as by the fact that his perch is precarious: “Move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror,” hovering as you do over “Descartian vortices” through which you might fall into that “summer sea,” no longer quite so mystical. Whatever one may think of monism and dualism in theory, in practice the duality of solid and airy substances pertains.
Office, custom, and architecture may suffice for ruling a regime under ordinary circumstances, but how to rule such a motley crew of all races, what Nietzsche would later call a cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships, and moralities? And how to rule a whaling ship (or a regime like America’s) for an extraordinary purpose, under harsh conditions? Ahab knows how. He commands the crew to gather on his quarter-deck and offers them a material inducement: “Whosoever of ye raises me that… white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!” The sailors cheer, and Ahab breaks out the grog to celebrate their unity of purpose. But Starbuck demurs. Ahab is usurping the authority of the owners of the ship, staging a coup d’état in their absence. “I came here to hunt whales,” Starbuck protests, “not my commander’s vengeance.” To establish his tyranny beyond the supports of office, custom, and architecture, Ahab must put down this murmur of rebellion against his rebellion. If the purpose of whaling is to make money, I, Ahab, have just offered money, the doubloon reward: “My vengeance will fetch a great premium here!” The material rewards whaling offers the sailors are years distant and uncertain, a percentage of the profits at the end of the voyage. The doubloon is here and now. ‘The people’ incline to follow the nearer, more concrete payout.
His challenge blocked on the level of material motivation, Starbuck invokes the other great incentive animating New England whalers. “Vengeance on a dumb brute! that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous!” But Ahab has an answer to the spiritual challenge, too—a call not to spirituality but to spiritedness. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks”—he begins as if he were Emerson, a Transcendentalist—but behind the brutish matter of the white whale lurks “an inscrutable malice,” not the supposedly benevolent nature Emersonians imagine. “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” Man: Ahab calls Starbuck and the crew to manliness; if Shelley’s Queen Mab reveals a universe supporting an anti-Biblical atheism of delight and freedom, Ahab reveals a universe supporting an anti-Biblical atheism of pure thumos. Politically, he knows he has the crew, ‘the people,’ behind him, against Starbuck’s weak, sober, spiritual aristocratism. “The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?” They are, and Ahab sees that “Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.” Starbuck is reduced to prayer: “God keep me!—keep us all!” Neither Ahab nor, as it will transpire, God ‘hears,’ heeds the prayer, but below deck the mysterious sailors whom Elijah asked about, the ones who have yet to come on deck, laugh in delight. Ahab commands that the sailors drink the grog (“It’s as hot as Satan’s hoof”), an order they do not fail to obey. Parodying a Roman Catholic mass, Ahab authorizes his “three pagan kinsmen,” the harpooneers, as his priests, who pass around the “murderous chalices” of grog. Pale, shuddering Starbuck turns away from the triumph of Milton’s Satan, who has justified his ways to men and thereby fixed them to his regime of tyranny, by their own impassioned assent.
The political philosophy scholar John Alvis has commented on Ahab’s brilliant, sinister use of demagoguery to rule souls, not merely bodies. [1] The Apostle Peter understands demagogues well enough to describe men like Ahab. “There were false prophets… among the people” of Israel, Peter writes, and there will be “false teachers among you, who privately shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.” Coming from within Christendom itself, they will appeal to you with covetousness, while “with feigned words mak[ing] merchandise out of you”; your greed for gain he will turn to his profit. They will “despise government,” as Ahab despises the government of the ship’s owners; “self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.” They will “count it a pleasure to riot in the day time,” or at least pass around the grog for others to do so. And so they “beguile[e] unstable souls” with “great swelling words of vanity.” Having described Ahab, Peter then writes what might be called a verse for Starbuck: “Of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.” (2 Peter 2) But does anyone on the Pequod think of Peter? Ishmael turns to the thoughts of captain, officers, and crew in the next four, brief, chapters.
If Ahab is right about Being, those whom Peter calls false prophets are the true ones, including Ahab himself. His day’s work done, the Captain, alone in his cabin, gazes out the windows at the sunset. He reflects on the crown he has successfully usurped; the metal in it is iron, not gold. The “dry heat” of the sunset no longer soothes, as it once did. “This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception”—insight into the malignity of Being—”I lack the low enjoying power” of his officers and crew. “Damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!” Ahab is Adam, but an Adam not humbled but enraged by God, allied with the serpent. His will is iron; that is his true crown: “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed I’ll do!” Soft Starbuck thinks him mad, “but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” “I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer,” become “the prophet and the fulfiller” all in one, guaranteeing his prophecy by his own action. His regime, his way of life, will be “the iron way.” But will he be a true or a false prophet?
A little later, at dusk, Starbuck leans on the mainmast, nursing his injuries. “My soul is more than matched; she’s”—note the feminine form—”overmanned; and by a madman!” His “sanity” has failed, and not only politically but morally: “He drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me!” Ahab “would be a democrat to all above,” challenging God, but “look, how he lords it over all below!” His “miserable office” will be “to obey, rebelling,” and “worse yet, to hate with touch of pity,” since “in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.” He can only take refuge in wishful thinking. “His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside.” Or not, God having His own purposes, His thoughts not being ours. Ahab has revealed something to Starbuck: “Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee!” Gathering himself, he adds, “but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures!” He prays to the “blessed influences” for help in this. But will those influences answer his prayer?
Still later, on the night watch, Stubb has “been thinking over it ever since, and that ha-ha’s the final consequence”—the ‘H’ sound of awe, filtered through his comic-shallow soul. “A laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer.” The unthoughtful man makes a suitably thoughtless prophecy: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”
Latest of all, the harpooneers and sailors sing drunkenly, to the time of Pip’s tambourine. The old Manx sailor prophesies to himself, “I wonder whether these jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will…” (In fact, he will not.) As a storm comes up, Daggoo and a Spaniard exchange racial slurs and start to fight; Tashtego observes, “gods and men—both brawlers!” while much-insulted slave-boy Pip says to himself, “that anaconda of an old man swore ’em to hunt” Moby-Dick—white men, he remarks, white whale, white squall blowing, and the “big white God aloft,” to whom he prays for mercy.
In the regime of isolatoes, only drunken sailors socialize, but their revelry ends in a fight. Ishmael pauses his yarn to make his confession: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul.” Human encounters with the White Whale had proven not only injurious but “fatal to the last degree of fatalities”; according to both Job and Hobbes, death is the king of terrors. Such terror generates legends that deepen the terror. Moby-Dick is ubiquitous, having been “encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time”; Moby-Dick is immortal (“for immortality is but ubiquity in time”). “But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings,” which make Moby-Dick into a god, or perhaps an angel of death, “there was enough in the earthly and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power”: his “snow-white wrinkled forehead”; his “high, pyramidical [mast-head-like] white hump”; his body—streaked, spotted, marbled with white. Above all, Moby-Dick inspires “natural terror” in his actions, the “unexampled intelligent malignity” with which he would retreat from pursuing whale boats, only to turn on them and destroy them with an “infernal foresight of ferocity.” Far from the dumb brute of Starbuck’s description, Moby-Dick acts like a brilliant military captain and assault force, combined.
This is why Ahab hates him. Commanding a whaling ship, Ahab had descended onto one of the pursuit boats; Moby-Dick smashed all three boats, and Ahab bravely continued his assault, stabbing the monster. “Moby-Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.” Ahab came to load “all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations” on the White Whale, now “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them.” Unlike the devil-worshippers of the ancient East, Ahab did not worship the evil one but “piled on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” In his delirium on the voyage home, “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.” By the time he reached Nantucket, however, he had learned to conceal that madness. His “great natural intellect,” entirely preserved, now served not as the ruler of his passion but as its “living instrument,” with intellect and madness binding to gather in his soul “a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.” The man who would strike through the mask of appearance to the evil underlying all Being mimics the prey he hunts, and sane Nantucketers like Mr. Peleg fell for the ruse. Indeed, they think, wishfully, that Ahab’s war against the White Whale will make him “superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack,” lending energy to the purpose of their intended regime on the whaling ship. “Had any of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! they were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.” Peleg called him an “ungodly, godly man”; he got it only half right, as Ishmael now accurately calls him an “ungodly old man” at “the head of a crew… chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask.” But there is more than that. The officers and crew unite under Ahab’s tyrannical regime because there is something of him in each human being. “The subterranean miner works in us all.” And so, “for one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.” No Christian, Ishmael nonetheless discovers what Augustine discovered in himself, that he would do evil while knowing it evil. In this, both men achieve self-knowledge while learning what human nature is. Socrates considers this the dual purpose of philosophy.
But what is the nature of the Whale, and especially the nature of his whiteness? From the “classification of the constituents of chaos” in Chapter 32 Ishmael arrives at “the whiteness of the whale” in Chapter 42—whiteness, which has no constituents. Ahab defines the Whale by his malice. Ishmael defines him by his whiteness.
“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” But why? Is whiteness not an emblem of the Good? Ishmael not only acknowledges that it is often taken to be such, but he offers examples of the thought from many regimes and civilizations ranging from European empires ancient (Rome) and modern (Austria) to the Eastern monarchy of Siam (modern) and the “Persian fire-worshippers” (ancient). Does not the Book of Revelation itself envision the “white robes of the redeemed,” the “great white throne” of God? On land, the White Steed of the Prairies recorded in Indian traditions “always to the bravest Indians… was the object of trembling reverence and awe.” At sea, the albatross has proved a somewhat more ambiguous presence, a creature of “spiritual wonderment and pale dread.” “Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.”
But whiteness itself has another dimension to it. “Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?” An albino human being unsettles us. As do the living who pale at the sight of such beings, and as do the dead, who wear their “pallor” as “the badge of consternation in the other world.” In the Bible, Death is personified as the pale rider on the pale horse, king of terrors both in the Christian Book of Revelation and the Leviathan of the materialist Hobbes. “Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul,” in reversal of the benign Transcendentalism of Melville’s contemporaries. “To analyze it, would seem impossible,” as whiteness has no parts.
But is our understanding of whiteness only a matter of “moods”? Is our sometime terror at it nothing but sickly fear? No: Tell me, Ishmael challenges his reader, why a strong, young colt, “foaled in some peaceful valley in Vermont,” will panic at the smell of a buffalo robe. The colt has never been gored by a bison, an animal that departed from that land decades or centuries ago. “Here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute”—a creature that is what Starbuck wrongly supposes Moby-Dick to be—”the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world.” “Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” This means that not only does Ishmael reject the God of the Bible, as Ahab does, not only does he reject Emerson’s vision of a nature whose “aspect is devout,” but he comes nearer to Ahab’s claim about the underlying nature of Nature. He presents us with a choice. Given whiteness’s “indefiniteness,” by which it “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” one might recall Pascal, terrified by those voids and immensities. The whiteness “shadows,” the whiteness darkens souls with fear. For Pascal, that fear was, as the Bible wants it to be for us, the beginning of wisdom—the fear of God. But is there a God? Here is the second choice: “Is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” Does the faith that may issue from our fear of God only amount to a comforting cover for our greater fear that there is no God?
Leaving theology aside, the “natural philosophers” have discovered “that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.” Let there be light, the God of Genesis says, but “the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself”; to consider it truly we must realistically see that “the palsied universe lies before us a leper,” its whiteness a horrifying and fatal disease. “And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” Why would men, “deep men,” men who see truly, not want to destroy their would-be destroyer, before it can destroy them? But for Ahab, and evidently for Ishmael, no faerie queen, no Mab, will redeem us with some brighter tomorrow. In Moby-Dick Melville not only anticipates the ‘spiritual’ tyrants of the next century but rejects their cheery illusions of utopia with which they would beguile the vast crews of isolatoes under the sway of their regimes.
Although Ishmael explains Ahab’s whale-hunt, he does not thereby endorse its purpose, or Ahab’s regime. In dispelling the wonder at whalers and whaling, Ishmael shows why all human beings prove vulnerable to Ahabian appeals, to the demagoguery that induces them to assent to the madness of the tyrant, the tyranny of madness. We all have in us what Ahab has in him. But to show what we have in us is not to commend it. Ishmael succumbed, but has broken the spell. He would not have ‘Young America’ under the spell of a tyrant any more than he would have it under the influence of the grog of bullying democracy. Neither the nature as understood by the American Founders, from which right may be derived, nor the nature of Emerson or the nature of Shelley, beckoning us to utopian illusions, nor the nature of Ahab, cunningly malignant and thus the justification for tyranny, adequately comprehends nature. Nothing adequately comprehends it, if comprehension means an all-encompassing, systematic understanding, parodied in “Cetology.” If the universe is diseased, it cannot be the foundation of right or of utopia; nor is it properly the object of rage, inasmuch as disease bespeaks no malice. Disease does not bespeak anything; it is dumb. A calmer state of mind, properly fearful but not paralyzed with fear, will be needed in the New America and in the soul of the New American.
NOTES
- John Alvis: “Moby-Dick and Melville’s Quarrel with America” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 23, Number 2, Winter 1996, pp. 223-247. Alvis remarks that Ahab never employs force, tyrant though he is.
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