Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

Here moral consciousness is given to all the ocean’s animals, if only to make them suffer, and the somber intensity of the language calls us back to the purpose of Ahab’s voyage, which is both noble and insane.

That in the passage’s final image neither ocean nor air offers safe haven points to a large difference of view about nature’s role among our nineteenth-century writers. Attitudes toward nature are often related to religious beliefs, and for Ralph Waldo Emerson, as usually for Henry Thoreau, nature is our secure home and the source of inspiration if our imaginations are open to it. Religious reformers and social commentators, both were New Englanders who had grown up in a landscape humanized by two centuries of settlement. They were concerned to make human life worthy of its natural surroundings, and these were in turn seen as informed by spiritual truth.

Writers of fiction were less confident about our home in nature. In the dark stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the physical world can give way at any moment, and in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, nature is benevolent or malign as a function of the psychology of the characters. For Melville, as later for Mark Twain, nature may be the mother of us all, but her violence destroys life as readily as she creates it; vigilance is the cost of survival, and even then we take great risks. Talking to Starbuck, Ahab describes the face of nature as a pasteboard mask: He varies between a belief that “some . . . reasoning thing” lies beneath it, and the thought that there may be nothing there at all (p. 203). While one must not confuse an author with his characters, Ahab is raising religious and philosophical issues that concerned Melville as well.

It is clear that Melville is not Ahab, nor is he Ishmael, though here the relationship is more complicated. “Call me Ishmael,” chapter I begins: The borrowed name lets us know that he will tell us only what he wants to, and that he is a man apart from his fellows. The biblical Ishmael is the illegitimate son of Abraham by Rebecca’s servant Hagar, and even though the Lord is good to Ishmael later in Genesis, his half-brother, Isaac, inherits the Lord’s covenant through their father (Genesis 16, 17, 21, and 25).

Melville’s narrator promptly describes dark thoughts approaching self-destruction: He pauses before coffin warehouses and follows every funeral he meets. But in the novel things don’t remain so grim for long. Just as the Lord in Genesis is good to Ishmael despite his illegitimacy, so Melville’s Ishmael floats to rescue with his best friend’s burial box. The image of death has become the means to life, a change typical of Melville’s density of view and sense of ambiguity. And the narrator’s depressions spoken of at the beginning are modulated by the very language in which they are described: He is serious in describing his “spleen” and the “drizzly November” in his soul, but he presents them in a way that masks the pain even as it bodies it forth. The joking tone in which that account is developed is one we hear very often from the narrator even when he speaks of serious things.

The Ishmael we hear at the beginning is in some ways the book’s most illusive character because, just as the biblical name suggests an outsider, a wanderer of sorts, he wanders in and out of the novel’s narrative voice as it moves along. In the early chapters he is fully present as a character as he leads us toward the
Pequod
, but once on board he soon melds into the crew as his storytelling duties are taken over by the much more knowledgeable narrator whose arrival is not announced, but whose presence is clear as early as chapter XXIX when we overhear an exchange between Ahab and Stubb, the second mate.

They are on the quarterdeck, where Ishmael, as a common seaman, has no right to be unless working, and even if he were he could not overhear Stubb’s private thoughts as he descends into the cabin. There is much in the book that Ishmael the crew member could not see or overhear: conversations between the ship’s officers, Ahab’s behavior at dinner with his officers, to say nothing of Ahab’s private thoughts in a dramatic monologue complete with stage directions. In “Sunset” (chap. XXXVII), the scene is “The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out” (p. 207). As in the preceding chapter, “The Quarter Deck” (chap. XXXVI), we have suddenly changed literary genres—we are for a short time in a play, not a novel.

As the action requires of him, Ishmael now and then returns as a man with a particular role on the ship, someone who could not have the wider knowledge we are often given. In chapter LXXII he is at one end of a rope with Queequeg at the other; in chapter XCIV he is squeezing coagulated oil back into liquid; in chapter XCVI he almost capsizes the ship; in the Epilogue he is floating with Queequeg’s coffin so that the ship
Rachel
can bring him back to tell the story.

These are inconsistencies, but how bothersome are they? Most readers have not been much troubled. Both narrators have the same voice and personality—one simply becomes the other, and it is best to think of them as the Ishmael who acts and the Ishmael who narrates, two functions of the same identity. Often enough we may not even notice the change from one to the other because we are caught up in the action and the strange brilliance of the style.

The book’s general narrator occupies a position between Ishmael, on the one hand, and Melville, on the other. We don’t confuse Melville with the other two—that shared personality is the author’s construction to serve his ends. But it is true that
Moby-Dick
is an opinionated work, and it is not surprising that the narrator sometimes expresses views that we assume to be Melville’s. This is true, for example, in “The Ship” (chap. XVI), where Melville seems to wonder what it will take to turn an old American sea captain into a noble figure worthy of the greatest classical tragedies. The paragraph is a virtual recipe for what Melville will do in creating Ahab later in the book, so much so that he might have written it after he had largely finished with Ahab, and placed it early in the book as a sign of what is to come (p. 106).

There are also passages in which the narrator expresses directly to the reader opinions that are appropriate to the text and are views that Melville clearly held. After explaining how property rights are established after a dead whale is temporarily abandoned, he asks, “What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish! And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” (p. 463). We should be annoyed if we thought that the story line were there only to set us up for the generalization, but Melville’s gifts as a storyteller prevent this: The comment rises from the action. While the passage is not about Ahab, it implies what is wrong with him—in his arrogance and isolation he denies the inevitable interdependence of personal identity and community, one of the novel’s great themes.

In a novel where ambition reaches out to some of the largest matters—man’s position in the natural world, the nature of charismatic rule in its moral dimensions, the very nature of reality itself—there are notable exclusions in
Moby-Dick
, though not through oversight. Important aspects of daily life are less represented than one would usually expect in a novel: Food, sleep, hygiene, pastimes are hardly present, nor matters of health—important on such a vessel—except for Queequeg’s illness.

These exclusions come about because the literary genre closest to
Moby-Dick
is not the traditional prose narrative, but the epic—a form in which the texture of common life is often treated lightly to allow concentration on the protagonist and heroic action. After the nights and steaks in New Bedford’s Spouter Inn and the meals of Mrs. Hussey’s Nantucket chowder, there is little detail of this kind once the
Pequod
leaves the dock, with four-fifths of the novel still to come.

Sexuality is powerfully present, but is more directly addressed in the ocean’s creatures than among the men who hunt them. There is the wonderful vision in “The Grand Armada” where the sailors see birth and nursing among a school of sperm whales. “Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seem divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep” (p. 451). But with the unsentimental realism so typical of Melville, this monumental ocean-pastoral is checked by the very hunt that allows the men to see it: The whalers are in the business of killing as many of these creatures as possible, and the cetacean mothers-milk will be red with blood.

Among the men these sexual issues are more guarded. It is of course a world without women; marriage and children are mentioned but never brought to life. Ahab has left his wife and child behind as almost all men did, but he has also done so emotionally, and while Peleg tells Ishmael that “Ahab has his humanities!” (p. 113) it is not a good sign that this needs to be said. Ahab’s initial isolation in his cabin is attributed to a serious wound in the groin inflicted by his whalebone leg, a sexual injury suggestive of what he has done to his own humanity. Less grimly, Queequeg compares the symbolism of Ahab’s gold doubloon, nailed to the mast, to “something in the vicinity of his thigh,” and Ishmael remarks, “I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer” (p. 503). These are coded references to energies that are more happily opened up at the Spouter Inn, where Ishmael and Queequeg become friends.

These two bear the book’s principal weight of affection, the love that best binds mankind together. In a later chapter they are on the two ends of a “monkey-rope,” Ishmael protecting his friend who is on the carcass of a whale with sharks attacking from below (chap. LXXII), and at the end of the book it is with Queequeg’s coffin that Ishmael saves himself. There are other characters who briefly show gentle and even affectionate recognition: Both Starbuck and Pip reach out to Ahab, who must rein in his momentary sympathies if he is not to be swayed from his purpose.

The matrimonial imagery of the Spouter Inn scenes is explicit, as Queequeg the first night holds Ishmael in “his bridegroom clasp,” but Ishmael finds this “a comic predicament” that he wishes to escape. The two become fast friends, and after talking in bed, “in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy loving pair” (p. 82). Queequeg tells the story of his life, and then “embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping” (p. 87). There has been controversy about this imagery, some seeing a movement toward romantic love. But one must be very careful before pushing Melville’s language into special meanings. More often than not such narrow readings do violence to Melville’s imaginative world, reducing rather than illuminating the resonance of the text. While it is true that the only fully happy ship the
Pequod
meets is called
The Bachelor
, one remembers that the permanent party on that ship’s deck includes the native girls who have run off with the sailors.

While Ishmael and Queequeg are the repositories of fellow-feeling, Ahab has almost entirely killed that in himself, and on the few brief occasions when his cold resolve is softened by those “humanities” that Peleg had mentioned to Ishmael, he pushes that emotion away lest it keep him from his aim. Melville intended to make Ahab a great man, and gave him just enough sanity to make us realize how great its loss had been.

Shakespeare was an inspiration to Melville in various ways, and surely so in imagining Ahab as a tragic figure in the classic sense—a great man brought down by his faults. In one sense Melville faced a task more difficult than for the Renaissance dramatists, for whom the status of a king or queen brought with it the culture’s deference toward that still powerful office, a position at the head of humanity with overtones of divine empowerment. If the protagonist was not a king, he was likely to be in line for it, the prince of possibility. Melville was acutely aware that modernity and democracy denied him that initial advantage, and it was only the beginning of an answer to make Ahab a sea captain, the ruler of his small world, which gave him station but not nobility.

Without hereditary claim, and only the formalities of shipboard as a substitute for court ceremonies, Ahab had to be constructed from the ground up as a man worthy of great regard. In “The Ship” there is a paragraph in which Ishmael lists the qualities necessary to produce “a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” (p. 106), and through the course of the book Melville does this by a series of references and actions that progressively make him much greater than a normal man. The first move is again to use an Old Testament name.

The biblical Ahab Melville had in mind was a powerful though evil king denounced, in both the Bible and the novel, by the prophet Elijah, who foretells his violent end. The warnings build as Ishmael is unable to learn much about him, and when Peleg says he “has his humanities” one wonders why something so apparently obvious needs to be said. Shadowy figures go aboard the
Pequod
and remain long in hiding, and other signs raise anxiety toward Ahab’s first appearance, where the imagery idealizes him in both his suffering and his stature.

The metaphors make him a man who, though burned at the stake, was only hardened by it, who took a lightning strike and showed only a scar like a great blasted tree, and who has the solidity of the famous Renaissance bronze Perseus, the son of Zeus whose supernatural feats included the killing of the Gorgon Medusa, the sight of whom turned men to stone (p. 158). Ahab is not of our world, far above us in suffering, survival, and force. His presence continues to grow with the strategies of his leadership, and in two of the book’s most remarkable chapters, the narrator works to make us as sympathetic as possible toward Ahab’s purpose. “Moby Dick” (chap. XLI) shows that his mad obsession is in intention generous toward all mankind, and “The Whiteness of the Whale” (chap. XLII) universalizes the awe and wonder at the whale’s beauty and the terror of its power and hue, a process begun in the Extracts that precede the narrative.