Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

The language here, as in many other passages in
Moby-Dick
, becomes almost Shakespearean in its power, through anarchism of vocabulary, strong disruption of modern word order, and great intensity of feeling. Occasional phrases even fall into the pentameter line of Renaissance drama; the speech is a version of the dramatic monologue of two and a half centuries earlier quite transformed for Melville’s purposes.

The exalted rhetoric of this kind is all the more effective because we encounter it only from time to time: Such flamboyance can’t be sustained for long without the reader’s fatigue, and one of the reasons it is so moving in
Moby-Dick
is that it rises from a foundation of skeptical intelligence and good humor. The comedy in the novel is central to its power.

The narrator had worried about how to raise his “low” materials to the level of tragedy. While he transforms the ordinary into things rich and strange through his high language, he heads off our doubts about such exaltation by making fun of his ocean world before we do. When he moves into a passage of extreme language, we respond on his terms because we have come to trust his voice, one steadily aware of what is irregular, strange, or absurd. These discordances are often played for humor even as the language creates them.

Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, for example, comes to carry serious meaning, standing as it does for human affection and trust in a world of suspicion and danger. Yet Melville initially presents both men as comic figures, Queequeg because of his unchanged native habits complete with filed teeth, pagan idol, and a for-sale severed head in his bag, and Ishmael because of his quaking fear at the sight of such behavior. Once introduced, however, Queequeg is used to satirize foolish contempt for alien cultures and the smug complacencies of routine religious belief. He comes to be a figure of almost pure virtue and Ishmael’s anchor to windward.

In being amused at the world, the narrator gives us the impression that he knows what life looks like since he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He sees much that is entertainingly odd, and is not above pure slapstick when in “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (chap. LXXXII) he argues that Saint George killed not a dragon but a whale. This is the kind of tall-tale absurdity more common in our writers of the American West than in Melville’s part of the country.

Ahab and Moby Dick, the book’s two great antagonists, are never made the subjects of humor because comedy would diminish their status as monumental beings set apart from their kind. Moby Dick is from the beginning presented as a creature of mythic power and beauty; anticipation and awe increase as allusions to him appear. Ahab, in turn, is from his introduction shown to be larger than life, and though there are signs of his earlier nature, humor by him or about him would make him too much like the rest of us. At a much lower level, Starbuck is also exempt because he embodies solemn, sensible, and Christian opposition to Ahab’s plan; he is shocked and fearful, sane but unavailing as disaster looms.

Despite the solemnity of Ahab and Moby Dick, our sense of them, too, rests importantly on the book’s humor. The balance and objectivity of the comic view make more believable the narrator’s repeated departures from this familiar world into emotional states evoking wonder at mythic dimensions of malignity and beauty, power or peace, all these sometimes fused together as in our first actual sight of the whale as the hunt approaches its end:

Remarkable here is the combination of contrary states: peace and violence, mildness and force, repose and activity, love and simple lust, seduction and rape, and all of this intensified by the animal’s supernatural beauty and power borrowed from the chief of the classical gods. Much in
Moby-Dick
rises to this level of eloquence, and no other work in American literature surpasses it in this respect. And powerful as such a passage is, it would be less so had we not come to trust the narrator’s good sense as he earlier made light of the whale’s anatomy even as he is impressed by it. We can more easily believe him when he is in deadly earnest because he is not always so.

This passage and many others like it push toward possible meanings, and when Sophia Hawthorne wrote that the Spirit Spout seemed to have a significance beyond itself, she was pointing to a literary cast of mind that Melville shared with her husband. Melville’s reply mentions that he had been vaguely aware that there might be “allegorical constructions” in the book, but allegory is not a term that properly applies to it. Here, and often in Hawthorne’s work, people and events take on a symbolic charge, but symbolism begins to approach allegory only when, on the level of ideas, the suggested meanings begin to be as coherent among themselves as are the things, people, and events in the basic story line.

Earlier in the century Edgar Allan Poe had argued that allegory was no longer an appropriate genre for the modern writer, and while he did not elaborate, it is because allegory works best when it refers to a rich, inherited system of thought widely believed in the general culture. When, in the immensely popular
Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678, 1684), John Bunyan struck a note by describing the Slough of Despond or the Delectable Mountains, the Hebraic-Christian tradition rang like a bell to thicken the resonance of the image. Strong allegory is handmaiden to established order and belief, and in Melville’s more secular time that tradition was not available in the same measure, nor was Melville a comfortable believer.

Melville was drawn to Hawthorne’s work for a number of reasons, and while concern for the darker shades of human nature was central in that attraction, Melville must have recognized a literary sensibility in some ways like his own. As the critic Richard Chase pointed out long ago, they are among a number of American novelists whose work reaches toward general meanings and abstractions more overtly than the fiction of, say, Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollop in England, who inevitably have such attitudes, but who embed them more deeply in particular characters doing particular things. Hawthorne used the term “romance” rather than “novel” when writing about his work, and both he and Melville often work through what Ahab calls “linked analogies,” the dramatized and oblique suggestions of symbolism, and they are less absorbed in the daily muck and ruck of life than many other writers.

But whatever their similarity, there are differences between them even on this score. As Hawthorne’s notebooks show, he often began to think about a story with a general idea, often a moral statement, and then developed characters and situations to embody it. Melville began in the opposite way: Actual sights or events would catch his interest, and they would take on symbolic suggestion after the fact. Melville began with the world, while Hawthorne sought it out.

That Melville in his last two novels moved in Hawthorne’s direction may help explain why the creativity of both men diminished well before the end of their lives. Both
Pierre
(1852) and
The Confidence-Man
are fascinating works, but both are overtly intellectual in the sense that the issues they address are at least as much in view as their characters, whose actions serve to raise problems whether they are solved or not. Both books cry out for “interpretation.”

This is a different orientation to fiction than that of the author who is primarily caught up in the lives of his characters as they work out their fates in the world we all know. The diversity of human life is without end, and such a writer can continue with vitality as long as energy and imagination hold out. But everyone has only a limited repertoire of ideas, and the writer who puts ideas first is more likely to run out of material. Individual artistic gifts are unpredictable, of course, but Hawthorne’s late romances were left unfinished, and Melville fell silent as a writer of fiction not only because his audience turned away but because he had said what he wanted to say in prose; he therefore turned to poetry.

In
Moby-Dick
Melville was in the flood of his powers, and modern readers have been endlessly interested, often coming to varied conclusions because the book’s most striking images and actions seldom have one clear meaning on which everyone can agree. Symbolism in this novel is well illustrated by “The Doubloon” (chap. XCIX), in which members of the ship’s crew examine the images on the coin that Ahab has nailed to the mast as a reward: Each makes a different interpretation, and this is in miniature the pattern for the whole work. Melville does not urge on us his own reading of the novel as a whole, and up to a point varied conclusions are legitimate as long as they are put forth with evidence and tact.

When one contemplates life-chances as portrayed in
Moby-Dick
, the narrator’s most striking gift is his ability to navigate cheerfully between the opposing forces of nature and the alternating appetites of mind, his compass the lessons of experience. There are few certainties in the world, and wisdom is to live as one can, in the face of mysteries, without pretending that they are anything else. A recurring image in Melville’s work is a language that cannot be deciphered. One sperm whale is “marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back!” (p. 249), and another is compared to the huge wine-cask in Heidelberg that is “mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematic adornment of his wondrous tun” (p. 398). The tattooing on Queequeg’s body holds

In a world where much is mysterious and experience evokes contrasting emotions, visions of good and evil both become dangerous when the focus on one obscures the other: The inattentive optimist will fall to his death (p. 198) and the obsessed contemplator of evil may well bring that about (p. 492). Nature is both our mother and our murderer: “When beholding that tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it” (p. 564). White is the symbol of innocence but is also “the colorless, all-color of atheism” (p. 238). A man cannot be fully independent, nor should his identity be submerged in the crowd (p. 462). The only certainty is that there is unending change, and the mind can only ask, “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” (p. 565). There is none in
Moby-Dick
, nor anywhere else in Melville.

No other American work approaches Melville’s ability here to alternate convincingly between complementary states, or even radical opposites, evoked with such imaginative force and conviction that we are for a time swept along in a contemplation of each possibility alone, or of a mixture so intertwined that the knot is not to be undone. Ahab is an arrogant, dictatorial, and insane figure who leads his world to destruction, yet Melville makes us think of him not simply as a madman, but as a great man gone mad.

There are similarities here to the poet John Keats’s praise of Shakespeare as one who “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 28, 1817). By this criterion,
Moby-Dick
is the great masterpiece of our literature, but with a large difference: Shakespeare was born into this condition, so to speak, while the narrator of
Moby-Dick
comes to it after arduous but failed attempts to resolve the mysteries. The imaginative calm to which Keats is pointing is, for the novel’s voice, a hard-won condition that in Melville’s career returns only intermittently after this work.

In the later novels, Melville colors man’s problems more darkly, the subtitle of
Pierre, or the Ambiguities
signaling the shift, and in
The Confidence-Man
, life becomes a puzzle to be parsed. Only in the great stories “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and
Billy Budd
do the dramatizations of ambiguity return with the balance of
Moby-Dick
, and by that time the humor is gone and the tone is somber. But in
Moby-Dick
, he portrays a world where good nature, intelligence, and good humor throw a light on experience that is both interesting and entertaining. Despite the looming disaster, the novel is in many ways a happy book because of the narrator’s infectious pleasure in telling the tale.

Melville’s importance in American literature is now so great that it is hard to realize that by the early decades of the twentieth century only a small group of devoted readers considered
Moby-Dick
the major work we now hold it to be. Though never entirely neglected, Melville had become a special interest rather than the widely read author he is today. His last novel,
The Confidence-Man
, had appeared in 1857; by then he had pretty much written himself out as an author of fiction, and he later supported his family by working as a customs inspector at New York harbor. From his death in 1891, it was thirty years before Raymond Weaver published the first full-length study,
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
(1921), and this was seventy years after the appearance of
Moby-Dick
, the book whose freshly assessed stature brought new attention to the rest of Melville’s work.