Herman Melville
him as the monomaniac incarnation of all the malicious agencies which
some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with
half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has
been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians
ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the East
reverence in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it
like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white
whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most
maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all
the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were
visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He
piled up on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and
hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest
had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
Ahab assembles his crew, and after working them up with a reminder of
their common duties, to sing out, to lower away, to get a dead whale
or a stove boat, he nails a gold-piece to the main mast and in a high,
raised voice exclaims: “Who ever of ye raises me a white-headed whale
with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw ... shall have this gold ounce.”
Daggoo recognizes Moby-Dick. Ahab, surprised, confesses his past
humiliation and announces his purpose. “This is what we have shipped
for, men! to chase the white whale on both sides of the land, and over
all sides of the earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!”
The crew is seized with Captain Ahab’s wild purpose. Starbuck alone,
prudent, thoughtful, pious, remonstrates with his captain. “‘Vengeance
on a dumb brute!’ cries Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest
instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems
blasphemous.’” And Ahab answers:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each
event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from
behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the
mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through
the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me;
he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable
malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is what I chiefly hate;
and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will
wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I’d strike
the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I
the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealously
presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair
play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.”
Ahab pledges his crew; they drink and swear death to Moby-Dick. Ahab
withdraws to his cabin, to contemplate his own madness, maddened:
there he defies the great gods themselves, mere cricket players and
pugilists. “I will not say as schoolboys do to their bullies--Take
some one of your size: don’t pommel _me_! No, ye’ve knocked me down,
and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind
your cotton bags!... Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can
swerve me.” The crew, lightened by drink, burst into revelry: they jig
and frolic and dream about girls. Ishmael’s shouts go up with the rest:
his oath had been welded to theirs; a wild mystical feeling is in him:
Ahab’s quenchless feud seems his. With greedy ears he learns the story
of the monster against whom he and his shipmates have taken the oath of
Ahab’s revenge.
4
And now comes Moby-Dick. In all the sperm whale fishery there is
no whale more prodigious in magnitude or malignity. All whales are
dangerous to hunt with harpoon and spear in a whale-boat; but Moby-Dick
multiplies the vicissitudes of the chase: he turns on his pursuers,
and again and again escapes them, with an apparently immortal destiny,
however accurately the harpoons may have been planted in his side, and
however strong the line that makes him fast. A wrinkled forehead, a
high white hump, and a streaked and marbled body add to his formidable
size: as sperm whales are more dangerous than Right or Greenland
whales, so Moby-Dick is more terrifying than the usual sperm whale. The
rumours about Moby-Dick raise to enormous dimensions what was already
great enough in actuality; but the very whiteness of the whale adds
something more.
While white, says Melville, has a hundred fine mythological allusions,
conveying some special virtue or perfection to the elephant of Siam or
the Imperial charger; while the white wampum of the red man was the
deepest pledge of honour, and the most august of religions had made of
it a symbol of divine spotlessness and power--for all these accumulated
associations with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime,
there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this
hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which
affrights in blood. The whiteness of the white shark, the whiteness
of the white squall in southern seas, the terror of white breakers
when a ship is skirting the coast--all these things gain an element
of bleak terror from their cold hue. White is the terrible, elemental
truth: all warmer hues and colours are but laid on from without: nature
paints like a harlot, and beneath these happy colours is the ghastly
white uniformity of the charnel-house. “Pondering all this, the palsied
universe lies before us like a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured or colouring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things, the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?”
5
Night and day Ahab’s mind broods over Moby-Dick. In his cabin he
pores over his charts, endeavouring to follow the seasonal tracks of
Moby-Dick from one probable feeding-ground to another; but, as he knows
his crew have common daily appetites, and the permanent constitution
of the manufactured man is sordidness, although he may occasionally be
fired into knight-errantry, on the first raising of a whale, the Pequod
goes in pursuit.
In his virgin encounter with the whale, under the “prudent” Starbuck,
Ishmael finds himself in a swamped boat, riding through the night in
the hope of being picked up in the morning; and on top of the long
vigil, the little whale-boat, lost in the mist, is run down by the
Pequod, and all the cold, drenched hands take to the water for their
lives. It is all in a day’s work. When terror and anguish become
unbearable, what seems most momentous becomes part of a general joke.
This humour of desperation colours and effervesces through all the
bitter potions that the tale itself offers: it does not remove the
bitterness, but, as sweet and bitter may mingle in the same draught,
it offers a counter-taste: and it keeps the most frenzied blackness
from having the unrelieved and inhuman quality of a maniac’s delirium.
The men who face death and danger most constantly, the sailor, the
miner, the soldier, the lonely pioneer, develop this shrug and grin
at the very moment of encountering death--and in the whale fishery,
these moments are plentiful. Little Pip, the negro, pops out of his
boat in fright, and is left behind in the heat of the chase, and,
though finally rescued, is turned into a blank idiot: Tashtego, ladling
out the fragrant sperm from the dead whale’s head, falls into it,
the entire mass drops into the sea, and the Indian is rescued only
by a feat of almost obstetrical skill: any hour, one may drop from a
lookout station or get tangled in the whale-line itself, as the whale
races with it, and perish in the coils. But what of it? “All men
live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
necks; but it is only in the swift, subtle turns of death that mortals
realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be
a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart
feel one whit more of terror than though seated before your evening
fire with a poker and not a harpoon by your side.”
As the pursuit of the whale goes on, as the Pequod encounters the
sperm whale and the right whale, and kills them, fastens them to its
side, and dismantles their corpses, getting sperm oil from one and
whalebone from the other, as they watch the spout of the whale from
the distance, or see, at midnight, an apparition of a spout, perhaps
a portent, perhaps jetting from the head of Moby-Dick himself: as
they sample the whale as food, as they render down its blubber into
oil, as they watch the sharks thrust their slithering upturned mouths
at the carcass, as they squeeze the lumps of cold, solidified fat
back into liquid; as all the events and preparations take place, the
whale finally emerges as a complete body. What the whale is to the
whaleman and what he is to the artist; what he is to the naturalist
and what he is to the merchant; and what he is in the chase--and
in the museum--and in human history--all these things come forth.
There is not one method of knowledge: every manifestation in human
experience contributes to the reality of the whale itself. No one
lives to himself, or comprehends himself, except by establishing
relationships with that which is outside himself: man gives to the
whale something that the creature is incapable of giving back: his
own needs, his own desires, his own understanding. Melville no more
forgets the aesthetics of whaling than he forgets the economics. He is
a free spirit: he explores everything, embraces everything, reports on
everything. We must not confuse Moby-Dick with the monomaniac captain
who belongs to the fable: the book itself has a hundred sides, and
is the precise opposite of that narrow quest. For immediate action,
people forget many of these relations: the artist or the scientist is
just as narrow in his interests as Flask, just as single-minded in his
pursuit as Ahab. But Melville is neither Flask nor Ahab nor artist nor
scientist: he philosophizes out of a completer experience and a more
coherent consciousness than any of these partial figures. The whale is
no phantom symbol; and this stage is no pasteboard stage. If this is
not the universe, the full universe, that Melville embodies under these
symbols, no one in our time has had inkling of a fuller one. Moby-Dick
is an imaginative synthesis; and every aspect of reality belongs to it,
one plane modifying the other and creating the modelled whole.
6
The ship sails on: she meets other ships and the crews mingle in a
conversation or “gam.” But Ahab restlessly drives on towards his
ultimate goal: to each captain his first question is--“Hast seen the
White Whale?”
Passing through the straits of Sunda, which divide Sumatra from Java,
the Pequod spies great semi-circles of whale-jets sparkling on the
horizon: she spreads sails after the Grand Armada; and presently, the
boats are in the midst of it: among sires and cows and calves, the big
and the little, spouting, playing, plunging, frantically mobbing the
whale-boat, a tumult of power and virile energy on the outskirts of
the Armada, but safe within the circle, calm and bliss, dalliance and
delight, calves milking their mothers, and amorous bulls warm-bloodedly
a-wenching. The boats, luckily, get out of this jam and tumult without
damage; but while they set their pennoned poles on many, only one of