Note: This is the third of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.
Queequeg’s idol ‘tells’ him that Ishmael should select the ship they will sail on. The idol will prove a poor adviser, but off Ishmael goes. He settles on the Pequod—named, somewhat ominously, after a Massachusetts Indian tribe now extinct. It’s “a ship of the old school,” well-weathered, “a cannibal of a craft”—resembling his new friend, that way—”tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” Also like Queequeg, it is “a noble craft,” but unlike him “a most melancholy one.” “All noble things are touched with that”—a line recalling Napoleon’s remark, “Yes, it is sad, like greatness.” [1] Greatness is sad because it is solitary; the great by definition must have few peers. The noble melancholy of the Pequod anticipates the character of Ahab, not Queequeg. Such a solid old craft, decorated with souvenirs of past triumphs over its prey, may attract Ishmael, giving him what will turn out to be a false sense of security. But he gives his readers no explicit reason for his decision, which may relate to his interest in seeking the origins of things.
He discovers one of the ship’s two principal owners, Captain Peleg, in his office—a wigwam on the deck, recalling the tribal name of the ship and, in the minds of some commentators, the symbol of the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall organization (and if so intended, a reminder of ‘Young America’). The owners and officers of the Pequod are Quakers, although each has gone his separate way from the original doctrines of the sect. Peleg tests the young volunteer. He disdains Ishmael’s merchant-marine background—no preparation for whaling—and asks him why he wants to go on the hunt. To learn about whaling and to see the world, Ishmael replies, to which Peleg replies, if you want to “know what whaling is,” look at the ship captain, Ahab, who lost his leg to a whale, and if you want to see the world the way a whaler sees it, just look out at the ocean from right here, because that is what you’ll be seeing from aboard ship. Ishmael persists, and that is all Peleg really cares about: his resolve.
The other principal owner, Captain Bildad, himself has captained a whale ship. He presents a paradox: a pacifist engaged in a highly sanguinary occupation. Such men “are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance,” named “with Scripture names,” speaking with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Quaker households, but “strangely blend[ing] with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.” Now looking back at his then-future captain, Ishmael remarks that “when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart,” long at sea and thus far from the conventions of shore, that man comes “to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast.” Such a man may “learn a bold and nervous lofty language”—like Ahab, and indeed like Melville. Combined, these attributes make him “one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.” “If either by birth or by circumstances, he have what seems a half willful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature”—intensifying the sadness of greatness, one will have “another phase of the Quaker,” indeed. The unresolvable tension between Christianity, especially in its Quaker form, and the warrior spirit, combined with intellectual brilliance, great-heartedness, experience of many civilizations that are far from Christian, exposure to the violent self-contradictions of the natural world; a gift for eloquence and therefore persuasiveness; and an obsession with death: this man may turn tyrant, but will be no ordinary tyrant. He will become, as it were, a metaphysical tyrant, a tyrant who takes his subjects on voyages of carnage. Stalin said to de Gaulle, “In the end, death is the only winner.”
In the meantime, more mundane considerations prevail. Peleg and Bildad negotiate over how little they will pay Ishmael. Bildad’s Quakerism has given itself over not to tyranny but to business. “Very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.” Indeed, “For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least”—never swearing except when he was aboard ship, commanding his men, from whom he “got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work.” This is the Quakerism of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, grown up in what had been Puritan Massachusetts, a Quakerism that has generated in Bildad a “utilitarian character.” The sea takes men away from the metes and bounds of land, but the way one acts when at sea, when liberated from the conventions of landedness, testifies to the nature of one’s soul, and souls will differ when made manifest.
Peleg’s Quakerism, somewhat less hard, has turned toward the valetudinarian. Captain Ahab, he explains, is “a grand, ungodly, god-like man,” but a young sailor shouldn’t worry. True, he’s named for the tyrant of I Kings 16-27, a man “evil in the sight of the LORD,” a Baal-worshipper who “did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel than all the kings of Israel that were before him” (16:33), enemy of the prophet Elijah, a man who fights three battles against the Syrians and dies during the last one. But he’s “a good man,” “something like me—only there’s a good deal more of him.” Admittedly, “he was out of his mind for a spell,” but only because his wound caused him such pain. True, “ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off.” Peleg concludes, sententiously, that “it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one,” and besides, Ahab has a “sweet, resigned” young wife and a child. “Ahab has his humanities!” Peleg will prove no better a prophet than Queequeg’s idol, although he is more loquacious. Ishmael goes away feeling “sympathy and sorrow” and also “a sort of awe”—the ‘H,’ again. His good experience with the noble savage Queequeg (better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian) and his turning away from Biblical restraints inclines him to underestimate the danger, one might think, although it is not clear that Melville so thinks.
Ishmael returns to the inn, finding Queequeg in the midst of a fast, perhaps as a precautionary act of devotion before the voyage to come. Ishmael delivers himself of a characteristically American rumination on religious tolerance. “We good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects.” Queequeg is content to worship his idol and fast; “there let him rest.” No one will argue him out of his beliefs, and truth be told “we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” The limits Ishmael puts on toleration are killing or insulting others and injury to oneself. Wondering if the fast has injured Queequeg, he finds himself assured that his friend suffers from no dyspepsia on account of it; indeed, his only experience of stomach upset occurred back on the island, when he over-ate at a barbecue of slain enemy corpses—protein passed around “just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys,” which one supposes also may cause similar discomfort. Ishmael doubts that “my remarks about religion made much impression upon Queequeg,” who “seem[ed] dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view,” a not uncommon trait among the pious. Also, he “did not more than one third understand me,” perhaps because of the language barrier. He finally “looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.”
As for Quakers Peleg and Bildad, their theological concerns prove simpler than Ishmael’s; they overcome any religious scruples about signing Queequeg as a harpooneer when they see how well he can throw his weapon. Indeed, when Bildad offers Queequeg a Bible tract, Peleg admonishes him: “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em.” Heaven forfend. For his part, Bildad corrects Peleg’s suggestion that he and Ahab must have thought of death and God’s judgment when in storms at sea; they thought of what actions would save their lives and the lives of their crew. For these Quakers, physical concerns readily supersede spiritual ones.
For his part, Ishmael remains in the grip of his own wishful thinking. Back in Nantucket, before the final boarding, he is approached by a man calling himself Elijah—the name of the Biblical prophet who opposes Ahab and Jezebel—who issues vague warnings about Captain Ahab. “I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug,” a false prophet. Still, Ishmael has his doubts about “committ[ing] myself this way to so long a voyage without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it,” but “when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.” And so he “said nothing, and tried to think nothing.”
Returning to the ship, he and Queequeg learn that Ahab has boarded the boat. They set sail on Christmas day, listening to Bildad sing a hymn “full of hope and fruition.” Bulkington is on board, too, and Ishmael pays retrospective tribute to his now-dead shipmate, who preferred “the open independence of the sea” to “the treacherous, slavish shore.” “As in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” In a chapter titled “The Advocate,” Ishmael expands this thought by making a sort of lawyer’s case in defense of whaling. Yes, it is a butchering business, but so is war, and we honor “Martial Commanders”; whalers show the greatest courage, for “What are the comprehensible terrors of men compared to the interlinked terrors of God!” Commerce, discovery, the political liberation of Latin America, the light that glows in religious shrines, the Kantian-philosophic prospect of world peace by dint of mutual understanding of civilized and savage peoples—all these great goods, real and prospective, owe a debt to whaling, a vocation praised by great authors from Job to Edmund Burke. The whale has even been written in the stars, as seen in the constellation Cetus. Don’t take your hat off in the presence of the Czar, but rather to Queequeg. And as for the life of the mind, “A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” The thought of Bulkington puts Ishmael in an aristocratic frame of mind, and the loquacity which has followed overwhelms his reservations about subjecting himself to the regime of a tyrant. His rhetoric has persuaded its principal audience, himself. As for Bulkington, commentators have wondered why he never opposes the rule of Ahab, as aristocrats have opposed tyrants. Neither Ishmael nor Melville explains this, but there may have been a hint in the earlier chapter in which Bulkington was introduced. At the inn, he does not attempt to rule his unruly and vulgar comrades; he could, because when he leaves they follow him. But he does leave, likely tired of their carousing. Bulkington’s aristocratic disdain for ‘the vulgus,’ the people, may hold him back from acting to protect them, from moving decisively against tyranny in a regime that valorizes the people.
No tyrant can rule alone; he needs not a real aristocracy but a pseudo-aristocracy that will enforce his commands, require of him no Magna Carta. Ishmael sketches portraits of Ahab’s three officers: the first mate, Starbuck; the second mate, Stubb; the third mate, Flask. A Quaker from Nantucket, “a long, earnest man,” “a staid, steadfast man,” Starbuck proves “uncommonly conscientious for a seaman,” “endued with deep natural reverence”—perhaps the Quaker “inner light.” And a prudent one: “I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale,” apparently meaning “not only that the most reliable and useful courage is that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.” His nature inclines him not only to the reverence befitting a Quaker but to what might be described as an Aristotelian esteem for the metrion, the moral center between impassioned extremes. Having lost his father and his brother to the sea, having a wife and child on shore, he is “no crusader after perils; for him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions.” To Starbuck, whaling is a business, as it is to Peleg and Bildad; younger than they, he means to take risks only if he needs to take them in the course of getting the job done. Why, then, does he serve Ahab? It is “not in reasonable nature,” Ishmael acutely observes, “that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had,” not to have “engendered an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up.” Starbuck has physical courage, the virtue between cowardice and rashness, but he “cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man,” an Ahab. Ishmael associates Starbuck’s virtues with the nobility of human nature itself, and therefore with “democratic dignity,” with “our divine equality” bestowed by the hand of “God,” by which he means “the Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind,” raising men like John Bunyan, Cervantes, and Andrew Jackson from prison, pauperdom, and the common people. But Starbuck lacks the spiritual courage of Bunyan, the wit of Cervantes, and the vigor of Jackson.
Second mate Stubb displays a different sort of courage. “Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests.” He lacks Starbuck’s prudence. “What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question.” Later he will say that “Think not, is my eleventh commandment” (with “sleep when you can” being the twelfth); thoughtlessness serves the tyrant’s purposes although, unlike Ishmael, Stubb never needs to struggle to suppress thought. Nor does he much fear God, as his “almost impious good-humor” carries him along, cheerfully puffing on his omnipresent pipe. Third mate Flask differs from both Stubb and Starbuck in being more thumotic; a lesser Ahab, he “somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him,” and so he makes war against them, although without Ahab’s grimness.
Each mate has a harpooneer serving under him when the whale boats drop into the sea to hunt a whale. Starbuck has Queequeg. Stubb has Tashtego, an Indian from Martha’s Vineyard, a man of the original stock of Nantucket whalers. Flask has Ahasuerus Daggoo, a giant African who has “retained all his barbaric virtues.” Ishmael observes that this division of labor, with the “native Americans” or white citizens ruling the non-white foreigners—the one group “provid[ing] the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles”—reflects the American workforce generally. And like many Americans, the workers too are “isolatoes”—on the whaling ships literally so, as most of them are Islanders. America consists of isolatoes, albeit “federated along one keel,” as the largely self-governing American states are federated. In this America, there is one anomaly, a person who doesn’t fit in to the purposes of the voyage. This is “black Little Pip,” a “poor Alabama boy,” whose only apparent function is to beat a tambourine. He is a sort of mascot; he might be taken for an American slave, except that he does no useful work. In the end he will play the role of fool to Ahab’s spiritually maddened tyrant/hero.
As the ship sails south, the warmth of the air finally brings the real ruler into sight, on deck. “His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.” Bronze is the symbol of God’s judgment of sin; Ahab will attempt to judge and punish the Judge. Cellini’s sculpture depicts the hero holding the head of Medusa, whom he has slain. After killing Medusa, whose gaze turned men into stone, Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda from the sea-monster, Cetus; he disposes of a rival suitor by holding Medusa’s head aloft, petrifying the man. Ahab would also slay the monster, but as a tyrant it is his own gaze that petrifies men, enabling him to rule them. He is marked (like Cain?) with a thin scar from head to toe, possibly inflicted “in an elemental strife at sea” or perhaps a birth-mark—the claims about it differ. No one disputes the cause of his other deformity, the leg-stump left over from, indeed, an elemental strife at sea, his fight with the White Whale. His gaze radiates “an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable willfulness, in [its] fixed and fearless, forward dedication.” This notwithstanding, “some considerating touch of humanity was in him,” as he avoided the quarter-deck when the sailors slept below, so as not to disturb them with the rapping of his whalebone peg-leg on the planks. Yet on one occasion, when “the mood was on him too deep for regardings,” he forgot; second mate Stubb emerges to ask deferentially if his captain might find a way to muffle the sound. Ahab calls him a dog, orders him back to the kennel; the offended Stubb protests, so Ahab calls him ten times a donkey, a mule, and an ass, whereupon the hapless subordinate retreats to nurse his wound. While Ahab throws away his pipe, a thing “meant for sereneness” and more fit for a Stubb than “a great lord of Leviathans,” Stubb falls asleep and dreams.
The dream-chapter is titled “Queen Mab.” Stubb dreams that Ahab kicked him with his ivory leg. An old merman appears, who comforts him by saying he was “kicked by a great man”—an honor, and one which will make a wise man out of him, too, if he understands that trying to kick back against a great man is like kicking a pyramid. Queen Mab, the Celtic name for the Faerie Queen, appears in at least two works of English literature Melville likely read. In Romeo and Juliet, lovestruck Romeo begins to tell cynical Malvolio of a dream he had. Malvolio cuts him short with a mocking speech about dreams: Queen Mab supposedly brings them to us, but in cold fact they depict our own wishes; the lawyer dreams of fees, the warrior of battlefield glory, and so on. If Melville alludes to this speech, he classifies Stubb’s dream with the wishful thinking that brings Ishmael and soon many others to submit themselves to the tyrant’s rule.
Queen Mab also appears as one of two main characters in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s early narrative poem of that name. The story there has nothing to do with Stubb’s dream, but much to do with the character of Ahab. The poem is a paean to antagonism for the God of the Bible, beginning with its epigraph from Voltaire, “Ecrasez l’infame!” Queen Mab casts a spell on the corpse of a dead maiden, raising her “Spirit.” She brings her far above the world to show her the vastness of the cosmos: “He who rightly feels [the universe’s] infinity and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe.” Such mere systems are too limited to comprehend the true infinity. All religions, but especially “the childish mummeries of the Jews” and, worse still, Christianity, cause most or even all evils on earth, including war, tyranny, selfishness, money-getting commerce, and slavery. Religion “peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, and heaven with slaves!” However, in a Spinozist or perhaps Hegelian turn, Queen Mab assures the Spirit that the true God, “the universal Spirit,” “the Spirit of Nature” with its “all-sufficing Power, Necessity,” guides us toward a better world. What men call God is only the personification of the unknown; what we need to know is that all is power, including the human mind, which has no free-will, and therefore cannot sin. There is no such thing as justice, “neither good nor evil in the universe”; all is utility, and therefore there is no reason for hatred or contempt. There is no “creative Deity,” separate from His Creation, holy, but “a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe.”
Therefore, “Ahasuerus, rise!” Queen Mab commands. In the Old Testament, Ahasuerus is a king of Persia, traditionally considered an example of the fool by medieval rabbis. In medieval legend, Ahasuerus is one name for the doorman at Pontius Pilate’s estate who supposedly taunted Jesus on the way to the Cross. Cursed to “rive the earth from pole to pole” (in Shelley’s telling) the Wandering Jew will not rest until the Second Coming. For Shelley, Ahasuerus is a hero who says “the tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill me.” The Spirit asks the risen Ahasuerus, “Is there a God?” Yes, he replies: a God of malice, his Son “a parish demagogue” who brought not peace but a sword “on earth to satiate with the blood of truth and freedom his malignant soul.” A fit subject for Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, Ahasuerus prefers “Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven.” In one of his extensive prose endnotes, Shelley claims that the real Jesus was a human reformer who died because he was a reformer at the hands of the religious and secular powers of the day.
Queen Mab describes an ‘end of History’: the “paradise of peace” where “Reason and passion cease to combat.” There, the disease of madness will be readily cured by the right diet. The Spirit returns to earth, reunited with her body in a Hegelian synthesis of the spiritual and the material, overcoming the fatal and false disjunction of these, enforced by the religions.
Ahasuerus Daggoo has indeed riven the earth from pole to pole, but more pertinently Ahab, whose name’s first three letters are identical, and who has wandered even longer, will be seen to strike against what he takes to be the malignity of Being symbolized by the White Whale. Sure enough, Ahab interrupts the conversation in which Stubb tells his dream to Flask, shouting, “Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts! If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!” It is Ahab’s first command to the whole crew. Stubb doesn’t like it (“Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind”) but he tells Flask to keep mum. He won’t cross the tyrant again. Does he thereby submit to reality, or only to the more comprehensive dream, and to the grander but fatal dreamer?
NOTE
- Trained as a lawyer, Pierre-Louis Roederer read and admired Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He specialized in commercial and tax law, serving as a Council of State and Senator under Napoleon. Walking with the Emperor at the gloomy Tuileries Palace, Roederer ventured to say that the place was sad. “Yes, it is sad, like greatness,” Napoleon replied. Charles de Gaulle interpreted this to mean that the great man, in taking supreme responsibility for a battle, or for the ship of state, necessarily isolates himself from those who do not take such responsibility. If that is what Napoleon meant, in associating greatness with noble melancholy he separated himself from, and elevated himself above, the disciple of Smith, for whom commerce betokened the natural sociality of human nature. Ahab will soon separate himself from the cheerful, businesslike Quakerism of his second mate, Mr. Stubb.
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