Herman Melville: Moby Dick

“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief,” Hawthorne once observed of Herman Melville (1819–1891), “and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” For Melville, human experience was ruled by contraries. “There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contraries,” Ishmael declares in Moby-Dick (1851). “Nothing exists in itself.” And those contraries were no more evident, he felt, than within each human being, as he or she struggled to find a basis for truth and faith, something that would really make life worth living. Melville could not resign himself to doubt, or a placid acceptance of the surfaces of things. He wanted to probe the visible objects of the world, to discover their animating structure, their significance. But he also sensed that the visible might be all there was – and that that, too, was a masquerade, a trick of the light and human vision. “The head rejects,” the reader is told in Melville’s long poem, Clarel (1876), “so much more/The heart embraces.” That could stand as an epigraph to all Melville’s work because it exists in the tension between meaning and nothingness. It bears constant and eloquent testimony to the impulse most people feel at one time or another: the impulse to believe, that is, even if only in the possibility of belief, however perversely and despite all the evidence. Melville did not begin with the ambition to become a writer. Nor did he have an extensive schooling. His father died when he was only twelve; and, at the age of fifteen, Melville left school to support his family. Working first as a bank clerk, a teacher, and a farm laborer, he then, when he was nineteen, sailed on a merchant ship to Liverpool as a cabin boy: the voyage, later to be described in his fourth novel, Redburn (1849), was both romantic and grueling and gave him a profound love for the sea. Several other voyages followed, including an eighteen-month voyage on the whaler Acushnet in the South Seas. Ishmael, in Moby-Dick, insists that the whale-ship was the only Yale and Harvard he ever had; and much the same could be said of his creator, who in 1844 returned to land, where he was encouraged to write about some of his more exotic experiences at sea. Melville accordingly produced Typee (1846) and Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), novels that deal, respectively, with his experiences on the Marquesas and in Tahiti. They were romantic seafaring tales and, as such, proved immensely popular. But, even here, there are anticipations of the later Melville: most notably, in a narrative tendency to negotiate between contraries – youth and maturity, the primitive and the civilized, the land and the sea. In his next novel, Mardi: And A Voyage Thither (1849), Melville grew more ambitious. Based in part on the author’s experiences in the Marquesas, Mardi is an elaborate allegorical and philosophical narrative. The two novels following this Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 97 concentrated on action: first, Redburn: His First Voyage, and then White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850) based, like Redburn, on Melville’s own experience. It was after completing these that Melville turned to the work that was to be his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, dedicated, in “Admiration for His Genius,” to the man who had become his friend and neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville took to rereading Shakespearean tragedy at the time of preparing the story of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale; and he drew on that experience in a number of ways. There are local resemblances. Ahab addresses the skeleton of a whale, for instance, in a fashion that recalls Hamlet’s famous meditation over the skull of Yorick the jester. There are stylistic resemblances. And there is, above all, the conceptual, structural resemblance. “All mortal greatness is but disease,” Ishmael observes early on in the narrative. That observation, as it happens, is borrowed from an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Shakespearean tragic heroes. Even without the help of such borrowings, however, it is possible to see that the conception of Captain Ahab is fundamentally tragic. Ahab makes a choice that challenges – the gods, or fate, or human limits, the given conditions of thought and existence. That choice and challenge provoke our fear and pity, alarm and sympathy. And that leads, it seems inevitably, to a catastrophe that compels similarly complex, contradictory emotions: the suffering and death of many, including a hero who appears to exist somehow both above and below ordinary humanity. The contradictions inherent in the portrait of Ahab spring from the dualism of Melville’s own vision. Together, the narrator and the hero of Moby-Dick, Ishmael and Ahab, flesh out that dualism. So does the structural opposition of land and sea, which rehearses in characteristically Melvillean terms a familiar American conflict between clearing and wilderness. The land is the sphere of “safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities”; the sea, in turn, is the sphere of adventure, action, struggle. The one maps out security, and mediocrity; the other carries intimations of heroism but also the pride, the potential madness involved in striking out from the known. The one inscribes reliance on the community, the other a respect for the self. A densely woven network of reference establishes the difference between these two territories; it also suggests the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of either choosing between them or finding an appropriate border area. The opposition between land and sea is made all the rawer by Melville’s portrait of the ship, the Pecquod, on which Ahab, Ishmael, and their companions voyage. The crew are together and alone, knit into one, shared purpose yet utterly divided in terms of motive and desire. Caught each of them between the land and the sea, the social contract and isolation, they remind us that this is a ship of life, certainly, burdened by a common human problem. But it is also, and more particularly, the ship of America: embarked on an enterprise that is a curious mixture of the mercantile and the moral, imperial conquest and (ir)religious crusade – and precariously balanced between the notions of community and freedom. All the tensions and irresolutions of Moby-Dick circulate, as they do in The Scarlet Letter, around what gives the book its title: in this case, the mysterious white whale to which all attention and all the action is eventually drawn. The reason for the mystery of the whale is simple. It “is” reality. That is, it becomes both the axis and the circumference of experience, and our understanding of it, in the novel. It is nature, and physics, a state of being and of knowing. Each character measures his 98 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 understanding of the real in the process of trying to understand and explain the whale; it becomes the mirror of his beliefs, like the doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast as a reward for the first man who sights the white whale, to be valued differently by the different crew members. It is both alphabet and message, both the seeming surface of things and what may, or may not, lie beneath them. So, like the scarlet letter “A” in Hawthorne’s story, its determining characteristic is its indeterminacy. How it is seen, what it is seen as being and meaning, depend entirely on who is seeing it. Three characters, in particular, are given the chance to explain what they see at some length. One offers his explanation early on in the novel, even before the voyage in quest of the white whale begins: Father Mapple, whose sermon delivered to a congregation that includes Ishmael in the Whaleman’s Chapel – and forming the substance of the ninth chapter – is a declaration of faith, trust in a fundamental benevolence. It is a vision allowed a powerful imaginative apotheosis in a much later chapter entitled “The Grand Armada.” However, this is not a vision in which much narrative time or imaginative energy is invested. The visions that matter here, the explanations – or, rather, possible explanations – that count, rehearse the fundamental division around which allMelville’s work circulates; and they belong to the two main human figures in the tale, its hero and its teller, Ahab and Ishmael. For Ahab,Moby-Dick represents everything that represses and denies. Believing only in a fundamental malevolence, he feels towards the white whale something of “the general rage and hate felt by the whole race from Adam down.” Having lost his leg in a previous encounter with his enemy, he also desires vengeance, not just on the “dumb brute” that injured him but on the conditions that created that brute, which for him that brute symbolizes – the human circumstances that would frustrate him, deny him his ambitions and desires. Ahab is a complex figure. A tragic hero, carrying the marks of his mortality, the human limitation he would deny, he is also a type of the artist, or any visionary intent on the essence of things. An artist, he is also an American: a rebel like Hester Prynne, an enormous egotist like Ralph Waldo Emerson in the sense that he sees the universe as an externalization of his soul, and an imperialist whose belief in his own manifest destiny compels him to use all other men like tools and claim dominion over nature. “A grand ungodly, god-like man,” Ahab projects his overpowering belief in himself, his will to power, on to Moby-Dick, seeing in the great white whale all that prevents a man from becoming a god. And the key to Melville’s portrait of him is its dualism: it is as if the author were summoning up his, and possibly our, dark twin. “Is it by its indefiniteness,” Ishmael asks of “the whiteness of the whale,” “it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe ...?” It is Ishmael who describes white as “a colorless all-color.” For the narrator of Moby-Dick, the great white whale unveils the probability that what is disclosed when we peer intently at our circumstances is neither benevolence nor malevolence but something as appallingly vacant as it is vast, a fundamental indifference. That, though, is not all there is to Ishmael. In the course of the story, he also undergoes a sentimental education. Beginning with a misanthropy so thoroughgoing and dryly ironic that he even mocks his misanthropic behavior, he ends by accepting and embracing his kinship with the human folly and weakness he sees all around him. Specifically, he embraces Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooneer, whom initially he finds, even more than most of humanity, repellent. It is this, Ishmael’s return to a specifically human sphere – expressed, in a Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 99 characteristically American way, in the bonding of two people of the same sex but from different races – that enables him, quite literally, to survive. When all other crew members of the Pecquod are lost, and the ship itself sunk, after three days of struggle with Moby-Dick; when Ahab is destroyed by becoming one with that which he would destroy, tied by his own ropes to the great white whale; then, Ishmael floats free in what is, in effect, a reproduction of Queequeg’s body – a coffin Queequeg has made, and on to which he has copied “the twisting tattooing” on his own skin. It is survival, not triumph. “Another orphan” of the world, Ishmael lives on because he has resigned himself to the limitations of the sensible, the everyday, the ordinary: to all that is identified, for good and ill, with the land. The difference between his own quietly ironic idiom and the romantic rhetoric of Ahab measures the gap between them: one has opted for a safety that shades into surrender, the other has pursued success only to meet with a kind of suicide. That difference also registers the division Melville felt within himself. Moby-Dick negotiates its way between the contraries experienced by its author and by his culture: between head and heart, resignation and rebellion, the sanctions of society and the will of the individual. And, like so many great American books, it remains open, “the draught of a draught” as its narrator puts it, because it is in active search of what it defines as impossible: resolution, firm belief or comfortable unbelief – in short, nothing less than the truth. Moby-Dick was not a success when it was first published; and Melville felt himself under some pressure to produce something that would, as he put it, pay “the bill of the baker.” That, anyway, was his explanation for his next novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). In the first year of publication, it sold less than three hundred copies. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), a weak historical romance set during the Revolution, was similarly unsuccessful. The Piazza Tales (1856) was far more accomplished, containing Melville’s major achievements in short fiction, “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” but it attracted little attention. Melville did, after this, explore the issues that obsessed him in two other works of prose fiction. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) offers complex multiple versions of the mythical figure of the trickster; it is at once a bleak portrait of the “Masquerade” of life, and a biting satire on the material and moral trickery of American society. Billy Budd, written in the five years before Melville’s death and not published until 1924, in turn, reworks the traditional tale of the Handsome Sailor, so as to consider the uses of idealism, heroism, and innocence in a fallen world. However, to support himself and his family, Melville was increasingly forced to turn to other, non-writing work. And to express himself, he turned more and more to poetry. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, based on a tour to the Holy Land the author himself had taken, was privately financed for publication; so were the poetry collections, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891). In his shorter poems, published here and in Battlepieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Melville is concerned, just as he is in his novels, with the tragic discords of experience. In “The Portent” (1886), for instance, he presents the militant abolitionist John Brown, the subject of the poem, as an alien and “weird” Christ figure. The poem, for all its ironic use of the Christ comparison, is not cynical; it does not deny Brown greatness of ambition and courage. As in Moby-Dick, though, admiration for such courage is set in tension with the imperative of survival: in 100 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 its own small way, this poem rehearses again the issue that haunted its creator – the necessity and the absurdity of heroic faith.

Preview questions:

1. This chapter is a close observation of Ahab in Ishmael's eyes. What does it reveal about the captain?

2. What does the white whale symbolize in the novel of Moby Dick?