Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4

  Without hereditary claim, and only the formalities of shipboard as a substitute for court ceremonies, Ahab had to be constructed from the ground up as a man worthy of great regard. In “The Ship” there is a paragraph in which Ishmael lists the qualities necessary to produce “a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” (p. 106), and through the course of the book Melville does this by a series of references and actions that progressively make him much greater than a normal man. The first move is again to use an Old Testament name.

  The biblical Ahab Melville had in mind was a powerful though evil king denounced, in both the Bible and the novel, by the prophet Elijah, who foretells his violent end. The warnings build as Ishmael is unable to learn much about him, and when Peleg says he “has his humanities” one wonders why something so apparently obvious needs to be said. Shadowy figures go aboard the Pequod and remain long in hiding, and other signs raise anxiety toward Ahab’s first appearance, where the imagery idealizes him in both his suffering and his stature.

  The metaphors make him a man who, though burned at the stake, was only hardened by it, who took a lightning strike and showed only a scar like a great blasted tree, and who has the solidity of the famous Renaissance bronze Perseus, the son of Zeus whose supernatural feats included the killing of the Gorgon Medusa, the sight of whom turned men to stone (p. 158). Ahab is not of our world, far above us in suffering, survival, and force. His presence continues to grow with the strategies of his leadership, and in two of the book’s most remarkable chapters, the narrator works to make us as sympathetic as possible toward Ahab’s purpose. “Moby Dick” (chap. XLI) shows that his mad obsession is in intention generous toward all mankind, and “The Whiteness of the Whale” (chap. XLII) universalizes the awe and wonder at the whale’s beauty and the terror of its power and hue, a process begun in the Extracts that precede the narrative.

  All this contributes to the status of the novel’s dark protagonist, a great man made dangerous by his crazed reaction to a dreadful accident. As sea captain, he is restrained only by the need to maintain the crew’s obedience, and except for a few they join his hunt because of his gift for mesmerizing ceremony. Only the ship’s officers hold back: He will insult Starbuck and Stubb, the first and second mates, but when he must he’ll give way just enough to blunt opposition, and this is not agreement but a means to his end.

  In creating Ahab, Melville was responding to one of the great issues of the time: the role of the individual in a culture that was increasingly democratic—that decentralized the old nodes of power and was at the time becoming more and more industrialized—that concentrated economic and often political power in new hands. Like the English social commentator Thomas Carlyle, whose work he knew, Melville was acutely aware of the cost involved in the new economy. In Redburn, he had vividly described the horrors of a Liverpool slum, and in the paired sketches “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” he bitterly contrasted the comforts of luxury and the dehumanizing demands of the early factory system.

  Involved in these cultural shifts was a stronger emphasis on the powerful person as the chief agent of historical change, and social commentators argued urgently for moral leadership on the part of those who could bring influence to bear. In England, Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1841) was a major call for such dedication. In America, Emerson and Thoreau stressed the proper cultivation of the self in the context of a democratic scene. Both saw a society in which too many defined the opportunities of individualism as money and position, and they called for personal growth informed by an openness to spiritual values working through the life of nature.

  The greater emphasis on the individual mind found diverse literary expression up to Melville’s time, from the Byronic hero to the protagonists of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both published in 1847). In America, Charles Brockton Brown and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed psychological derangement and its effects, and by the time Melville met Hawthorne the older man had already written much about how a will to dominate can distort the personality and damage others. Though Ahab’s imperial mind has little interest in money, he is crazily bent on the exercise of power—he manipulates men with great skill and flamboyance as though they were “mechanical,” as he says of Stubb, the second mate, and he later extends the term to the general crew.

  Ahab is, finally, an “isolato” of the kind we find elsewhere in Melville and in Hawthorne as well: the man who cuts himself off from his fellows out of an egotistical illusion of superiority often combined with an obsession with revenge. Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter (1850) is like Ahab in his desire for retribution, an obsession in both figures that erodes their humanity as they become morally destructive to themselves and to others. But Ahab has a grandeur that protects him from Chillingworth’s unworthiness, a largeness of character born of the vast scale of his purpose combined with his intermittent self-knowledge. At times Ahab knows what he has done to himself, but the awareness is rapidly overridden by the hatred that drives his all-powerful will, a will that in the world of the Pequod nothing can stop except his death.

  Ahab is at the same time a grand figure of Romantic individualism and an example of individualism gone terribly wrong; he sums up what is both noble and lethal in the cult of the great man. At the climax of his speech to the corpusants, the rare but real glowing lights that can form at the ends of the spars, Ahab declares that “a personality stands here”; he has in mind an unfettered assertion of the self in its worldly practice, and one may remember that Walt Whitman later said repeatedly that Leaves of Grass was the expression of an American personality during its time in the nineteenth century. In letters, one can watch such assertions work themselves out for ill or good; in life, the issue is at what point the unfettered self must be checked for the common good. It is understandable that at the height of twentieth-century totalitarianism, some readers saw Ahab as a fascist type, but that is a limited view. He is a figure complex enough always to be characteristic of tendencies in any social and political form.

  Starbuck and Pip are the only ones who try to dissuade Ahab, one the second in command, the other at the bottom of the ship’s roster. Starbuck is a good man who goes about his business in a levelheaded way, and who shows his decency as he tries to stop Flask from lancing a sick whale just to cause pain: “There’s no need of that!” (p. 418). When Ahab announces his purpose, Starbuck tells him that he has signed on to hunt whales, not his captain’s vengeance. Ahab tries to bribe him, but then takes the measure of his three mates and sees that in the face of the crew’s enthusiasm they can be controlled if not enlisted.

  Though Starbuck lives by Christian values, he even thinks of killing Ahab, but can’t bring himself to violence against a man he otherwise reveres; and before the last day of the chase he makes a final appeal: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” (p. 649). But these are thoughts and comments, and he cannot take effective action against a man who renders opposition harmless through personal force and the orchestration of emotional rituals.

  A more serious threat to Ahab’s aim is “the little negro Pippin” who was saved “by the merest chance” after he jumped out of a whaleboat in fright and sinking deep “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (p. 481). The experience drove him mad, and it is his helplessness that makes Ahab pity his complementary opposite.

  Pip’s voice carries more than an echo of King Lear’s Fool, whose lack of power gives him license to speak the truth. Ahab is touched but must push away his own compassion as dangerous: “There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady” (p. 610). Both Ahab and Pip are largely, though not entirely, insane: Ahab’s derangement is a pathological expansion of the self, while Pip’s is just the opposite; his identity has been emptied out by his brush with death and divinity. When Ahab leaves the cabin after they talk, Pip speaks of himself in the third person: “Now were even poor
Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding. Who’s seen Pip?” (p. 611). This is the castaway’s opposing parallel to Ahab’s address to the corpusants: “Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights” (p. 580).

  Style

  When, in “The Ship,” Ishmael is describing what is required to portray the character who will be Ahab, he mentions “a bold and nervous lofty language” (p. 106), and while this well describes Ahab’s speech, it points more generally to Melville’s greatest achievement in the novel—the flexibility and brilliance of one of the great styles in English.

  All accomplished writers develop characteristic styles in which purpose and technique become one. Many writers have one consistent manner, but there are others like Melville or Mark Twain or William Faulkner who develop multiple styles and use one or the other depending on what they wish to do. In Moby-Dick, there are three basic patterns; they are by no means always neatly separated but are enough unlike to warrant separate notice. First, there is neutral, straightforward exposition; the longest sustained passage of this kind is in chapter LXVII, “Cutting In.” The language is direct, lucid, and in the best sense simple, as we are told how blubber is removed from the whale’s carcass. The narrator’s personality is hardly present, and the chapter could have been written by another skillful writer closely familiar with the process. This is the narrator’s plain style; there are many shorter passages of this kind throughout the work.

  The second and most frequent tone is the one we hear as the novel opens: We are in the hands of a narrator whose personality is much in view as he tells us about his depressions and self-destructive thoughts, but he does so in a jaunty, half-joking way that entertains by the extremity of his imagined actions. Exaggeration is Ishmael’s stock in trade for both comic and serious purposes. He is “given to pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet” (p. 27), remarks that are caricatures of the truth, but that leave the truth in place. Rhetorical extremes are wonderfully flexible in Melville’s hands; they are often funny but can also move to exultation and mythic power. For a paragraph we hear rather mocking talk of black moods and aggression; he thinks of pistol and ball—these could be used against himself or others, and he also feels like “methodically knocking people’s hats off” (p. 27). Having given his reasons for shipping out, Ishmael spends the rest of chapter I treating the lure of the sea.

  This second style is the book’s dominant one, that of a voice describing unfamiliar and even improbable objects, people, and actions, usually in an amused manner created in part by either excess or understatement. These things are described in a huge vocabulary stocked for many different purposes, and the narrator intermittently uses elaborate language with a light, self-conscious irony.

  When the narrator is making a point or more weightily constructing an argument, he typically writes with a long rhythmic breath, and often in periodic sentences that go on and on, withholding the point until the end. By then we have worked through the accumulated evidence given in a series of parallel phrases beginning with “considering that . . .” or “though . . .” or “while . . . ,” and the effect is to pile on detail so thickly that we are finally moved to agree, or if the purpose is a joking one we listen to the mock-serious detail leading to the final surprise. The mounting particulars may be either real or fanciful, but the result is to press us into a corner. A passage in “Stubb’s Supper” (chap. LXIV) shows this kind of construction shaped to a grim purpose, and contains a kind of ambiguity deeply characteristic of Melville’s mind as he deflates human pretensions by comparing men with a school of sharks feeding on a whale’s carcass roped to the ship (p. 346).

  The novel’s third stylistic manner is what one can call the American sublime, a high and extravagant rhetoric designed to sweep us away in an emotion-charged thought so powerful that we for a time suspend judgment in the thrill of the linguistic flood. In such a passage the frequently bantering air and comedic exaggeration drop away as the skeptical intelligence that creates that tone is suspended. The intention now is to immerse us in poetic language so moving that we at least temporarily yield assent to the ideas and emotions asked of us. The earliest example is a brief passage at the end of chapter I and is the narrator’s first reference to the yet-unnamed Moby Dick: “There floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” (p. 32).

  This is a dangerous mode because unless the writer’s intelligence and gift for characterization are just as powerful as the rhetoric is radical, such passages become mere purple-patches, sounding false and sentimental because they demand emotion that has not been earned, not prepared for, in the rest of the text. In Melville one can see failures of this kind in his third novel, Mardi, that strange and interesting work in which he begins to experiment with unconventional narrative. The problem in Mardi is not a lack of intelligence, which Melville had in spades, but the rather wooden characterizations brought about by what Ishmael calls “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Many of the figures there do not so much breathe and act as stand for things, which was also Hawthorne’s problem when he was not writing from his strengths.

  In Moby-Dick, however, Melville is at the peak of his powers, and the intermittent passages of heightened rhetoric operate as epiphanies within a larger context either of description or of an argument already developed in the passages leading to the poetic rise. For example, in chapter XCVI, “The Try-Works,” there is an elevated passage of this kind, by no means the most extreme, which sums up the preceding discussion. While at the ship’s helm, Ishmael has become mesmerized by staring into the fire, and he almost capsizes the vessel. Near the chapter’s end there is an appeal to maintain a balanced view of the world: “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!” (p. 492). One must be aware not only of evil, but also of the good.

  In the chapter’s last paragraph, Melville develops a metaphor confirming the earlier assertions.

  Give not thyself up then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar (p. 493).

  The high rhetoric is legitimate because it is not a momentary and isolated appeal to our emotions, but rather the final statement of an argument. That it takes the form of metaphor strengthens the intellectual position by embodying the thought in physical form, a representative example of how Melville uses such language. What saves these passages from excess is a fierce intelligence that fuses idea and image, and when this is done with the frequency and consistency found in Moby-Dick, it is the gift of a major poet, though in prose.

  Perhaps the most extravagant passage of this kind is, in chapter CXIX, “The Candles” (p. 576), Ahab’s speech to the corpusants. It is likely that Shakespeare’s King Lear lies behind this passage. While at work on the novel, Melville read or reread several of the tragedies, and one sees the effects in various ways, anachronistically so in the “dramatic” scenes complete with stage directions. That influence certainly strengthened the book, and Lear’s character in part contributed to Ahab. In act 3, scene 2, Lear, half crazed on the heath and beaten by the storm, begins to move toward the humility with which he ends. For Ahab, of course, there is no remedy for his obsession, which drives him and his crew to their deaths. In the measure that we are moved by Ahab’s speech, even though unsympathetic to his intent, it is because we have come to know that he is awe-inspiring in his personal force and the deranged purity of his aim. This is why the passage
comes late in the book: Melville had needed time to create Ahab as a man mad and magnificent enough to berate lightning during a typhoon.

  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.

  Humor

  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.