Herman Melville
presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;
nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a
June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long
been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself
belongs to Heaven and Hell--all its naturalism, all its accurate
detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that
everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge
off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond
the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of
Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle
portion of existence--that which we agree to call civilized--is the
realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal
existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the
realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile
and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both
aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of
eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed
glasses.
On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg
performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a
bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking
him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent
magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There
is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall
be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these
separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and
affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing,
and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the
story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who
commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the
central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.
The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails
are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard,
he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward
the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks:
the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on
the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not
enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a
last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The
captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three
heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone
Atlantic.”
Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea
and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs.
Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible
and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who
places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these
genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or
Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately,
Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his
design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is
about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep
earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the
open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth
conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it
to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the
lee, even if that were safety.”
Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea
is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never
reach the bottom, once land is far astern.
2
When the whale enters, the narrative for the first time pauses; and, in
the pause, one discovers that the story and the people are secondary
matters, while something more wide and reaching comes into the fable.
The whale is a symbol in the heart of man; it has its own existence
and value there: but the whale is also a creature in natural history,
and its shape, its bulk, habits, anatomical characteristics, family
relations, its place in politics, economics, history, and human
adventure, is a further part of that natural history. The chapter
on the whale, in which the various branches are listed under a sort
of bookseller’s classification, into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo
whales, is an excellent example of Melville’s way of assimilating and
revaluating knowledge, so that what was extraneous becomes intrinsic,
and what was a fact in the history of the whale becomes an element in
the myth that he is weaving.
A timid writer would have left these classifications and divisions
out: how on earth is one to make interesting reading out of a bare
catalogue? But Melville carries the load with Olympian levity: he
invents a fresh classification, unknown to Owen or Cuvier, and then,
with a final dash of apparent impatience, he leaves the system
uncompleted--even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, “with
the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.”
This absurd, bookseller’s classification, and this last touch of
impatience are not due to Melville’s incompetence: the first tells
us that all systems of thought have in them something arbitrary and
human, and the zoologist’s classification and system is no less so
than the human foot, as the standard of linear measurement: when one
sees objects under the figure of eternity, the scientist’s divisions
have the same limitations as the bookseller’s. In a century when only
a few rare-minded mathematicians were elaborating the theory that our
existing geometry was but one out of a number of possible systems,
with different sets of postulates, Melville was slyly demonstrating
that all our thought has this conventional basis. One may alter the
convention, change the point of approach, and create a different
order, equally useful, equally competent, equally true. When Melville
stops abruptly without finishing his own work, he points out to us
that knowledge of all sorts belongs to an infinite series: there is no
final stopping-place: and he who thinks his system is complete has only
demonstrated his own limitations.
Although Melville plays with science, he utilizes all that it can give
him, and he never seriously departs from its findings except in taking
the fisherman’s view that the whale is a fish, and not, as is actually
the case, an aquatic mammal. But the whale that science investigates,
the whale that is stranded on the beach, or whose skeleton is suspended
in mid-air in the natural-history museum, is not, however thoroughly it
may be dissected and articulated and labelled, the whole whale, even
for science; for a whale, like every other creature, has a habitat,
relations with other living creatures, and certain ways of functioning,
moving, mating, finding food; and there is a sense in which one is
as near to the scientific truth about a whale when one is fighting
the creature in an open boat, as when one is counting its vertebrae,
examining its tissues under a microscope, or comparing its skull with
other mammalian skulls. Melville gives a completer account of the whale
than the anatomists: he approaches it with a harpoon as well as a
dissecting-knife: he observes its characteristic reaction to stimuli
as well as the organs by means of which these reactions are effected.
On the other hand, the physical pursuit of the whale is only a part of
the story: the more one learns about such a creature, the more widely
do its relations ramify, not merely in its own world, but in man’s: and
the higher the significance of the hunt itself. These passages about
the whale and the methods of whaling, about its dignity and adventure,
these comments upon the science of cetology--all these things are not
uncouth interruptions in the narrative: they are profoundly part of it:
the stream widens here, as the Hudson widens at Tappan Zee, without
losing its flow and purpose. From now on the universal, symbolic aspect
of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in
and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the
other, and is by turns figure and background. The physical expanse
of the book, its deliberateness of movement, its slow undulations,
are necessary, like the long swells and the wide expanse of the ocean
itself, to give a feeling of immensity, immensity and power.
3
Who are the men summoned together for this voyage? The chief mate,
Starbuck, is a Quaker by descent, a “long earnest man, and though born
on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his
flesh being hard as a twice-baked biscuit.” Starbuck is conscientious,
prudent, inclined to respect outward portents and inward presentiments:
above all, the memory of his young Cape wife and child bent the welded
iron in his soul. Stubb, the second mate, is a different man: “A
happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came
with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis
of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged by the year.” Beneath these two stands little Flask, the third
mate, a native of Tisbury, in Marthas Vineyard. In his poor opinion,
the whale was but a species of magnified mouse or at least water-rat.
If Starbuck is the prudent imaginative man, and Stubb is the competent
sensible matter-of-fact man, Flask is the happy ignorant man, inclined
to be waggish in the matter of whales.
Only slightly lower in rank than the mates stand the savage harpooners:
Queequeg, and Tashtego, a Gayhead Indian from the Vineyard, and Daggoo,
a gigantic, coal-black negro savage, with a lion-like tread, moving
about the deck in all the pomp of his six feet five in his socks. “A
white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of
a fortress.” As for the crew itself, they were not merely islanders,
usually; they were Isolatoes, each man living on a separate continent
of his own. Above them all towers Captain Ahab. The first time he
appears on deck, a foreboding shiver runs over Ishmael. “Reality outran
apprehension.... He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.”
One of Ahab’s legs has been snapped off by a whale: he stands on a
stump made of whale ivory, with a crucifixion in his face, in all the
nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. “A Khan of the
plank and a king of the sea and a great Lord of Leviathans was Ahab.”
In his presence, his mates shrivel and crumple up, like a paper in a
fire. Compared with Ahab’s titanic pride, their decent professional
self-respect is nothing. There is madness in that pride, the madness of
a tormented soul.
What goads Ahab? What goads him is the memory of his encounter with
that white whale, Moby-Dick, who, in malice or play or accidental
defence, had bitten off Ahab’s leg and left him humiliated and
crippled, for long months of days and weeks, stretched in one
hammock, his torn body and gashed soul bleeding into one another,
and so interfusing, making him mad.... “Ever since that almost fatal
encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the
whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last
came to identify with him not only all his bodily woes but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before