The Cry for Myth (33 page)

As the statement from Gnosticism at the head of this chapter tells us: the problems of freedom, moral strength, and creativity are intimately connected with evil. “O alas, how now do men accuse the gods,” cries Homer in the
Odyssey
, “For they say evils come from us. But they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.” Perhaps our greatest sin is our refusal to look evil and the devil straight in the face.

POE’S “RAVEN”

The conflict between the devil and God has been experienced by poets ever since human beings learned to communicate and is closer to us than we think. The American poet Edgar Allan Poe illustrates this in his well-known poem, “The Raven.” He writes about the devil or demon in our terms:

Thus Poe described the struggle within himself against what he calls the demon and prophet. Poe’s heart is “by horror haunted,” his soul is doomed to lie in this condition. Except—and this throws clear light on the whole creative process—
Poe turns his agony into a poem
.

The creative process is characterized by joy one hour and agony the next. But if one wishes to experience the sense of joy, one must be willing to endure the agony of the journey into hell, more commonly called the dullness of hour after hour when inspiration is conspicuous by its absence.

John Steinbeck describes how “the despair came on me” when he was writing his great novel,
The Grapes of Wrath
. He was choking with trepidation about the work as he was writing it. “It’s just a run of the mill book,” he wrote in his diary. “And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do....I’ve always had these travails … never get used to them.”
†

The Grapes of Wrath
turned out to be a book for the ages.
The specific topic of the Joads was universalized by Steinbeck in his struggles in describing these impoverished people; in our day it would be the homeless and the street people. He received a Nobel Prize particularly for this work, but he had to fight his devils every step of the way, his devils being expressed by fatigue, discouragement, and most of all despair about his ability as a writer.

MOBY DICK AND THE MYTH OF CAPTAIN AHAB

Moby Dick
is a tale of the myth of the devil on a whaling ship, with Captain Ahab as skipper. This
Pequod
set forth for two years on a voyage to the far southern seas in search of the Great White Whale. Surely a classic, Melville’s story is considered by many readers to be the greatest American novel. Melville gives us a picture of Satan in the person of Captain Ahab, an embodiment of that fallen angel or demi-god who in Christendom was variously called Adversary, Lucifer, Satan, Devil.

It is a marvelous story of the hunt for the white whale in distant oceans, and it grips us with the passion that fits its subject, the attraction of the devil in the person of Captain Ahab.
*
The Biblical name “Ahab” is taken from a king of ancient Judah who gave Jewish prophets much trouble; and he was especially attacked by Elijah.

The young man who relates the tale introduces himself simply with the phrase, “Call me Ishmael.” This also fits a Biblical myth—it is the name of the little boy of four or five who is driven with his mother out into the unforgiving desert and sure starvation by Sarah, the first wife of Abraham.

At the beginning of
Moby Dick
, there occurs a Sunday worship service led by the pastor of the whaling church in New Bedford. The pastor climbs up to his pulpit by his rope ladder, which is the prow of a whaling ship, and there he delivers a sermon to his seafaring and God-fearing congregation on the story of Jonah, who was swallowed by the whale while he was trying to escape God’s command. Divine commandment is a law at sea, and hence Jonah is brought back in the belly of the whale.

Though the
Pequod
sails from New Bedford on its voyage to the South Seas on Christmas day, the sailors do not see Captain Ahab for several months. They only hear the sound of his pacing—tap-tap-tap—all night long on the deck of the ship. His peg leg was a result of his previous encounter with the great white whale. But Captain Ahab’s hatred, burning red hot till it carried everything before it, is deeper than a lost leg. He is filled with the devil’s hatred of this great beast. He is to engage in a battle like the wars of the gods on Mt. Olympus which caused the whole world to go into convulsions and explosions which the ancient Greeks could only endure with bated breath.

At Easter Captain Ahab appears and calls his sailors together on deck. He there conducts a Black Mass, welding together the spirit of the crew to engage in a life-and-death battle with Moby Dick. This is clinched by the shouting crew as they all drink grog from a horn, joining their captain in his war of hatred against the arch-enemy, Moby Dick. All the sailors’ ears and eyes and strength are devoted to this volcanic struggle; everything is subordinated to finding and killing the Great White Whale. Henry Murray states, like almost every other reviewer, that the White Whale is a myth of God.

Ahab is so filled with fierce hatred, so absorbed with the life-and-death hunt, that he refuses to join another ship,
Rachel
, in the search for the son of the
Rachel’s
captain, who had become lost in the wilderness of the unending sea. The captain of the
Rachel
could only shout back in response, “May God forgive you!”

From the very soul of Melville, the experience of the heart of this quiet New England author, has come a character who represents the spirit of evil on this voyage of hatred and revenge. Captain Ahab embodies the spirit of Lucifer or Mephistopheles or the devil all in one in this peon to the anti-god. “Melville had learned on his own pulses what it was to be Narcissus, Orestes, Oedipus, Ishmael, Apollo, Lucifer. In this story he condenses from his own creative imagination the nature of Satan.”
*

The only one who was not convinced by the shared hatred of Moby Dick was the chief mate, Starbuck, a devout Quaker who believed he should shoot Ahab according to the laws of the sea but does not have the courage to do so. Ultimately Starbuck comes to love his fierce captain, committed to destruction though Ahab is. The devil has in this, as in any other conflicts, the strange power of evil. In Ahab we see the devil incarnate.

After a year and a half they sight the Great White Whale. For three days the battle ensues. The sailors, imbued with the spirit of their captain, absorb the powers of hell as they harpoon the great creature again and again. In the fight Ahab’s peg leg is broken, another is quickly made, and this also is broken in the struggle against the Great White Whale.

After the second day, Starbuck, the mate, tries to persuade Ahab to call off the fight:

“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Star-buck; “never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!”

But Ahab answers,

“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes.

“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”

Yes, he does act under orders like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s
Faust
, who also acted under orders from Lucifer. Later Ahab cries,

“Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.”
*

On the third day (the phenomenon is parallel with the last three days in the crucifixion of Christ), when the Great White Whale is again struck with harpoon after harpoon,

“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack. But maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.

Ahab cries,

“Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel
my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief
. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour yet now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…. while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!
Thus
, 1 give up the spear!”
†

And Ahab hurls his last harpoon. He is driven so crazy by his passion for vengeance that he leaps upon the whale’s body and
is entwined to the whale’s back by his very own ropes. He sinks below the ocean waters, drowning in the great ocean of his hatred.

But this is not all. Infuriated, the white whale then attacks the ship. It lifts the prow high in the air and breaks the ship asunder. “Great God, where is our ship!” cried the men.

Moby Dick then fiercely drives the boats with the men clinging to them under the water. Then he attacks the stern, turning it on end so that it too sinks below the ocean’s surface.

and so the bird of heaven, with angelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her….

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
*

The epilogue begins with a quotation from Job, uttered by Ishmael as he floats on a log:

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee….

“The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.

“It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men where tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunken ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool.… Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up
at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”
*

CATHARSIS IN THE STRUGGLE WITH EVIL

Like all great myths in literature,
Moby Dick
performs the task of giving the reader—indeed giving posterity—a catharsis from excessive anxiety and guilt. This we see in the experience of participation in a profoundly creative experience.

Henry Murray writes that for him reading
Moby Dick
is like listening to Beethoven’s
Eroica
. In reading the mythic tale, we feel cleansed as if by a great religious experience, the destruction of Ahab, the embodiment of the devil. The world and life have a deeper quality that reaches down into a person’s soul below even the customary “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
. Love and joy and death confront one another in these depths of emotion.

In a letter to Hawthorne after he had finished
Moby Dick
, Melville wrote, “I have written a wicked book.” Then when he heard that Hawthorne understood and liked it, he wrote back, “I feel like a new-born baby!” He had experienced the catharsis that one feels in creating something beautiful. The feeling is not just a “victory” over the devil or a wiping out of evil—these by themselves would lead only to sentimentality. It is rather the catharsis of feeling cleansed through one’s battle with the devil, one’s struggle with the recalcitrant words until one is able to express the vision in his or her own heart and mind. It was a cleansing of the fierce discord with the devil.

Not that the devil will not come back again. But rather that the author has learned in his struggle with the daimonic that he, the creative person, can meet evil and make of it something
joyous, beautiful, and health giving. One never finishes this battle once and for all. Goethe struggled for forty years before working out a creative ending for the last half of his
Faust
.