Feb 17 2010
Madness and happiness found in whaling and the sea
At the very start of Melville’s Moby Dick, we meet our narrator, Ishmael. Before we can even escape the confines of the first paragraph, he immediately throws his sanity into question: “…whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me… then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball” (Melville 3). In terms of narration, Ishmael has now made it quite difficult for the reader to trust his oncoming reports. When he admits that this time around he wants to try a whaling voyage, that distrust deepens; why would the reader ever trust the perspective of a man with the desire to virtually enslave himself for 3-5 years?
But, as we soon see, this madness is all relative. Perhaps, one might think, to be a whaler a man must contain some type of madness within himself, whether it be the madness of Ahab’s aporia, Starbuck’s superstition, Stubb and Flask’s self medication, or Pip’s susceptibility to the endless vaults of the sea. After meeting these personalities, Ishmael’s manic-depressive manner seems to fit right in with the motley crew of the Pequod.
Ishmael’s madness is managed (or expressed, one might say) largely in his complete abandonment of the construct of “happiness” as seen on shore. As Ishmael has his first shift at the masthead in open water, he reflects on how his happiness and his madness intertwine and how they manifest themselves in whaling as a solution: “The whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber” (172). Ishmael sees the root of his madness in his philosophic mind; he loves the masthead because it gives his mind a temporary outlet, alleviating his melancholy… or perhaps heightening its control over him, so he can lose himself within it (which is arguably what happens to Pip when he falls overboard). As we discussed in class, this makes him a bad sailor, but it is one of the reasons he is drawn to whaling.
Another time we see Ishmael reflecting on this is in his first interaction with spermaceti. It is the first time that Ishmael really articulates (both for us and most likely for himself) his reasons for abandoning shore in his depression:
I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. (456)
Ishmael sees the construct of life on land as something barring men from their true happiness-society forces man to come to grips with what he lacks, and to form his new happiness around domestic life. The manual work of bursting clods of spermaceti finally allows Ishmael to unlock his own true happiness, and we finally see why he rejects life on the land at his most depressed: escaping the confines of the earth allows him to unlock his true happiness, and at the same time and revel in his madness, rather than suppress it.
Works Cited:
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Northwestern University Press, 1988. Reissued 2003. Print.
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Superstition is certainly a pervasive (perhaps to a fault) characteristic of many of the men on the Pequod- almost necessarily, because of the kind of life-endangering absurdity that whaling entails. I agree with these assessments of the mates, Ahab, and Ishmael, whose superstitions drive their melancholic selves further to madness or because of which they must falsify happiness through self-medicating. I also wanted to bring the harpooneers, especially Queequeg, into the equation. Queequeg’s seemed ‘superstition’ is quite pronounced, as he prays over his little figure. Here, his seeming religious believes are implicitly equated to superstition because Ishmael does not really take them seriously, discussing his “performances and rituals” (73) and lamenting how “deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his” (77). However, Queequeg’s spiritual convictions seem to far outweigh those of his Christian comrades, who have to turn to superstition for solace, and thus his personal happiness seems, well, one of the only legitimate ones on board. Certainly none of the white characters we’ve met are happy. He is comfortable working with the whale and ‘domestically,’ and does not view the sea as an escape to avoid killing himself or to evade trials at home. He even dies peacefully: “Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if any if it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yoko between, he called for the coffin lid…to be placed over him” (427). One cannot possibly imagine any of the Christian seamen going out this way. Ishmael assesses the mates at the beginning for their levels of fear, and the superstition or self-medication they employ to evade it. Queequeg, this ‘savage’ with ‘ridiculous’ rituals, seems to lack any sort of ‘savage’ or ‘voodoo’ superstition and confronts his life with a set of powerful and deeply spiritual beliefs. The dichotomy between the men is no accident.