Moby Dick

As we read on and Ahab’s mission of vengeance gets closer to its climax, we see more and more stirrings of insurrection on the Pequod, caused most principally by the crew’s fear of Ahab’s insanity.  Starbuck explicitly defies Ahab concerning the issue of whether or not to stop an oil leak (Chapter 109), and then later contemplates killing Ahab for the good of the remaining souls on the vessel (Chapter 123).  The crew has come to fear Ahab more than fate itself (538).  Interestingly enough, our narrator Ishmael has for the most part avoided revealing or acting upon any feelings of desperation.  He witnesses just about everything that happens on the Pequod, and is not ignorant of Ahab’s destructive course, but is hardly as desperate in his actions as, for example, Starbuck.

This should not be much of a surprise to us.  In the very first chapter of the book, Ishmael disclosed his general indifference about being completely subservient to a captain, even likening himself to a slave:

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content. (24)

Ishmael is seeing the manifestation of his views play out – that “old hunks of a sea-captain” is driving his ship and crew to disaster.  Does Ishmael still rest comfortably, content with his work on the Pequod and the knowledge that the “universal thump” will be passed around eventually?  If he thinks that thump will be passed around to Captain Ahab, doesn’t he fear that it will come from Moby Dick, and that he will be victimized by it as well?  These are obviously the thoughts running through Starbuck’s head.  We talked in class about how Starbuck may be seen as an advocate of slave revolt and rebellion.  Ishmael, then, would be wholly indifferent to rebellion, someone satisfied with the system as is.  Are we meant as readers to comply with Ishmael’s indifference to rebellion, or even to notice it (it’s easy to forget that he is not only the narrator, but an acting member of the crew)?  When we reach the climactic meeting between Ahab and Moby Dick, Ishmael’s actions will reveal whether he is still the philosophical yet submissive man from that first chapter, or if he has a little revolt in him.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1991.

Almost all the characters on the Pequod absolve themselves of responsibility and allay their melancholia by attributing actions and events to Providence or fated destiny. Melville’s Calvinistic pre-determinism is at work here, but I argue that he ultimately rejects it in the case of Ahab. In the chapters leading up to the final chase of Moby Dick, Starbuck’s dire warnings against continuation of the voyage are a counter to Ahab’s claims of lack of agency.

Here are some phrases and sentences that show the overwhelming obsession with fate in the last quarter of the novel.

‘Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “Ho! The fair wind! Oh-he-yo, cheerly, men!” the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.’ 492

‘…the fated Pequod’ 498

‘…they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfillment of an evil already presaged. ‘ 502

‘But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.’ 516

‘Ha! Yonder! Look yonder, men!’ cried a foreboding voice in the wake.’ 518

‘By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder, windlass, and Fate is the handspike.’ 522

As Ahab’s monomania degenerates into raving incoherence, he increasingly blames his state on Fate. In a sense, this voyage was meant to occur in the scheme of things. Starbuck desperately cautions against Ahab’s proposals, but  to no avail. Perhaps it was an attempt to get through Ahab’s madness to the reasoning part of his mind, with the lesson that Ahab had indeed chosen this path and could depart from it if he so wanted.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Signet Classic. 1998

Person-labeling is dangerous. Its seduction, however, in making easy categorizations of people so we can wrap our heads around them, make them easier to remember, has made it a fixture in human social life. How many times have you been asked, or asked, after brief introduction to a fellow Vassar student, the noxious, oppressive “what’s your major?” or “where do you live?” Certainly I have done so, if only as a feeble attempt to advance conversation rather than any genuine interest in, say, where someone lives. But then again, who should care? Perhaps I should grant you more benefit of the doubt, but I nonetheless maintain that it is largely a substanceless question, at least partially designed to fit that given person into your mental person-labeling chart. Worse is the “major” question. It allows you to “know” something about that person: “Oh, she’s a philosophy major. She likes big questions and, unless she goes to law school, may flounder in the professional circuit, having to deal with real, practical questions with which her knowledge of abstract concepts cannot help her.”  However right or wrong those immediate conclusions are is beside the point, and I hope you get mine.

So when Professor Friedman commented that Melville takes on his society’s propensity for qualitative categorization based on physical attributes (see any of Ishmael’s initial descriptions of anyone), I was eager to find a really good example in which a given character does not conform to his stereotype. My favorite one thus far  is from the beginning of Chapter 108, “Queequeg in His Coffin,” when Ishmael describes Queequeg as very sick:

“But as all else in him thinned, and his cheekbones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of luster; and mildly but deeply looked at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die.” (Signet, 460)

Queequeg might be labeled as a pagan, a tattooed freak, an incoherent, babbling brute, and a cannibal, all reinforcing his stereotype as a savage, but his penetrating, warm, affirming eyes transcend simple categorization, declaring his individuality. He is not merely a savage; he is Queequeg!

Ahab’s all-consuming monomanical vindictivness is most readily explained by his missing leg. The loss of this appendage has such a devastating effect on the psyche that he ceases to be among others in the world, or can not be in the world, until he captures Moby Dick.  Albeit, general psychology and common sense gives the reader the impression that Ahab’s mad quest is but a symptom of something deeper, a character trait fundamentally more insidious than a generalized insecurity resulting from a lost limb. The lost leg becomes but a symbol of a fallen nature. Speaking to the carpenter tasked to make a new leg, Ahab remarks:

‘Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?’ (Melville 454)

Ahab must be speaking of something else here. Something irretrievably lost but keenly needed for his vitality or redemption. Melville gives us no answers through this part of the story. Captain Boomer, of the Samuel Enderby, also lost a limb to Moby Dick. His take on the matter is decisively different from Ahab’s:

‘No, thank ye, Bunger,’ said the English captain, ‘he’s welcome to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?’ – glancing at the ivory leg. (Melville 426)

Of course, Ahab’s disinterestedness in this advice is what will soon doom him and the Pequod to danger and disaster. The plot thickens.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

This being my third or so reading of Moby Dick, I was tickled to find that I had not before noted the hilarity found in the relationship between the personalities of Stubb and Flask, and their names.

He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster.  Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair.  What he thought of death itself, there is no telling.  Whether he ever thought of it at all might be a question…

I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his peculiar disposition…

Stubb is clearly a man who lives for the moment, all the while puffing on a stogie.  His actions and attitude are relaxed, calm, uncaring, and often happily oblivious.  Stubb is also is a bit of a jokster, occasionally picking on Flask.  That Melville cast Stubb as a man of the herb is doubtful, but he is certainly characterized as such.

…in his poor opinion, the wonderous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least a water-rat, requiring requiring only a little circumvention, and some small application of time to kill and boil.  This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the mater of whales…

Flask’s primary characteristics are an oppositional attitude, a seemingly foundationless hatred of whales, and rather short temper.  One can also assume he has a bit of a drinking problem.  While marijuana use was not really a salient (or at least public) issue in Melville’s time, alcohol certainly was.  Flask’s personality traits fit with those of a drunk.

Stubb and Flask are often described as representatives of opposing philosophies, and to be sure they are.  However, I see them also as men of two different vices–and examples of the pitfalls of each.  As a pothead, Stubb is happy, carefree, but consequently oblivious to the dangers of whaling; as an alcoholic, Flask is angry, impulsive, and, like Stubb, unaware of the dangers he faces.  The difference is that Stubb has either forgotten the dangers, is too high to care, or has smoked himself into a philosophy of fatalism (the generally accepted philosophy of Stubb), while Flask is blinded by his anger/hatred, or is so mad at the whales he’d die trying to kill one.  Stubb can’t see through the smoke, and Flask’s vision is blurred by the booze.

Might be a stretch, but I had fun writing about it!

Preface: I’m really interested in the characterization of Captain Ahab through rumors both before and after chapter 28, and how he is depicted as a mystery and a legend. In reading Ishmael’s first full description of the man I became particularly interested in the phrase “barbaric white leg” when our narrator first notices the whale jaw peg leg. I thought it had a bit of an interesting connection to race in the novel, so here I am, trying to combine race and characterization.

When the surreptitious Captain Ahab finally appears before the crew of the Pequod, his grim air overwhelms Ishmael — so much so, our narrator tells us, that it took him a moment to realize that much of the grimness came from the captain’s “barbaric white leg” (117).

The phrase struck me because of the juxtaposition between “barbaric” and “white.” Ishmael most often uses the word “barbaric” to describe men of other races, much like his use of the word “savage.” The contrast between the two words sums up Ishmael’s first impression of Captain Ahab quite well. The captain, though a white man, is “wild” (117) and is in many ways depicted as superhuman, even mythical.

Before chapter 28, in which we meet Ahab, we learn about him through what others tell Ishmael. The rumors construct Ahab’s reputation, and the man becomes the subject of a myth. Ahab’s mythical characterization continues in Ishmael’s initial description of the mighty man. When he first lays eyes on his captain, Ishmael notes that “his whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze,” likening the man to a statue (117). Who gets statues made of them? Certainly not whaling captains. Ancient, brave, mythical heroes get made into statues. Ishamel continues to glorify Ahab by comparing him to a “great tree” (117). This further separates Ahab from the other characters, from humans, and makes him more of a god-like figure.

Let’s go back to the phrase “barbaric white leg.” What makes the leg “barbaric” is its inhumanness. The leg, made from the jaw of a Sperm Whale, is by definition not human. While Captain Ahab’s being inhuman is what makes him great, we must note that therefore the use of the word “barbaric” in describing the non-white characters in Moby Dick is racist.

Ishmael often uses the word to describe the harpooneers, as much as he uses the words “savage” and “heathen.” We know, as modern readers, that these terms are politically incorrect and just plain rude. Ishmael’s use of “barbaric” in his description of Ahab reveals why. In Ahab’s characterization, to be inhuman is to be different from everyone else. However, that does not mean that to be different is to be inhuman. Regardless, Ishmael uses the same adjective to describe both the inhuman Ahab and the different harpooneers.

“Barbaric” and “white” is a suitable description of Ahab, the mysterious, wild captain. He is the least human character of the novel. But the presence of the word “barbaric” and its synonymity to “inhuman” makes us reflect on its use in other parts of the work, and its racist implications.

Emily Dickinson’s poem 11,

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.	5
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

without the funky font of “UCH,” though more obviously applicable to Ahab, (except, I suppose, that Ahab has authority over his ship and can “run” with his madness) can also be applied to the minor character, Pip, the slight slave-boy driven to madness.  In the saddest part of the book thus far for me, Pip jumps from the boat to catch a whale and is left floundering in the ocean for what is beyond a mere scare tactic after Stubb warns Pip that he won’t save him a second time because “a whale would sell thirty more times than [Pip] would in Alabama,” and is not worth the trouble or energy (400).  

In “The Doubloon,” every major character gives his thought on the doubloon while looking at it, and ends up, as Ahab said during his soliloquy, “mirror[ing] back his own mysterious self” (416). Indeed, the men, supposedly probing the doubloon, really just reveal themselves, their philosophical and personal essences. All except Pip. He offers the gem, “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look,” capturing the truth in that everyone sees what they want to see, believes what they want to believe, and acts accordingly.

Pip, however, is not always of “divinest sense;” just after he offers his profound insight, he squawks like a crow, reinforcement of the fragile, unpredictable nature that defines madness. And it is no coincidence that Pip calls himself a crow, a mean bird: in Ishmael’s philosophical break with Ahab in “The Try-Works” when he says “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness,” conceding that while woe has the potential, through the deepest, darkest plumbings of the soul, to bring forth genius, it may also give way to a dead-end existence of futility, he uses an eagle to demonstrate this possibility of attaining genius. Even though crows soar, eagles, on high mountains from the star, will always be higher. Ahab and Pip both may be mad ultimately, but they do soar occasionally, as evident by Pip’s judgment of “The Doubloon” scene.

The Brutality of the Pequod’s Fated Pariahs

‘Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals – morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, soofficered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.’  (Melville 180)

All the men under Ahab’s mad quest, the so-called mongrel renegades, castaways, and cannibals, share what Ishmael recognizes as a certain status of pariahdom. Outcast from the security of land and thrown into the danger of the seas, they participate in the particularly inelegant activity of whaling, reinforcing their outsider status.

Melville’s brilliance lies in his subtle indictment of the savageries of whaling and of Ahab’s monomania, the subtlety inhering in the device of using beautiful prose to ameliorate violent scenes. The description of the demise of the whale Stubb kills in Chapter 61 is evocative of this device. As the whale bled, ‘the slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men.’ (Melville 278) The violence visited upon the whale is projected back to the whalers themselves, exposing their iniquities, at least as seen through the eyes of Ishmael. When the whale finally dies, the bloody scene is deceptively rendered in seemingly pleasant language; ‘At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea.’ (Melville 279) Melville’s descriptive powers perhaps make these scenes palatable to the reader, but in conveying this false sense of tranquility, they paradoxically foreshadow portents (the calm before the storm, so to speak)

It is important to note that Ahab’s physicality and his vindictive quest is not euphemized. Perhaps we are supposed to maintain some modicum of sympathy for the ship’s subalterns, while focusing on Ahab’s monomania, which is amplified by the contrast in prose.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

When looking for character development, most readers would skip over the cetology chapter.  However, Melville inserts a remarkable amount of personality into his description of the whales.  This is not surprising, considering that, in many ways, Moby Dick is the central character of the novel.  In the Cetology chapter, Ishmael refers to every whale as “he,” not “it,” an important, humanizing distinction.  Some descriptions are more clearly human-esque than others, such as when Ishmael refers to the Sulphur Bottom whale as a

retiring gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings.  He is seldom seen…and then alays at too great a distance to study his countenance.  He is never chased; he would run away with the rope-walks of lline.  Prodigies are told of him.  Adieu, Sulphur Bottom!  I can say nothing more that is true of ye (p. 133)

This description sounds eerily applicable to a human, especially the phrase “retiring gentleman” and the words “profounder” and “countenance.”  Ishmael is describing a shy man, who runs away from those who pursue him.  Few have seen his face, and they know little about him.  Without the mention of diving, this could easily be a reclusive guest at an inn or some mystical stowaway on the Pequod.

The characterization of whales seems to be a matter of some debate with the characters in the text.  When describing Moby Dick’s encounter with Ahab, and the taking of Ahab’s leg, Ishmael states that “no turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice,” (p. 177).  This creature is vindictive, which gives him power of thought like a human.  The very fact that he has a name, Moby Dick, shows that the line between animal and human is blurred in this narrative.  Of course, not everyone sees it this way.  When Ahab informs the crew of the goal of this journey, Starbuck protests.

‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness!  To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous!’

Starbuck does not approve of anthropomorphism.  To him, blurring the line between human and “dumb brute” is unacceptable, blasphemous.  The repeated descriptions of whales as having human characteristics, and the strength of Starbuck’s objections, suggests that this debate will carry on throughout the novel.

(New York: Signet Classic, 1998)

Why does Ishmael seem invisible?  He is always narrating, and yet he never seems to arrive in front of us.  We learn of his personal history only through vague allusions, such as Cornelia’s example below.  He can be equated with Melville, and the openness of his character equates him with the reader as well.  He uses “I”, “one”, and “you” equivalently, actively switching between them.  Chapter 3 begins: “Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft” (9).  It is the reader who enters the room, the “everyman” (“one”) who is reminded of a ship, but it is Ishmael’s own memory which resonates.  He is a non-entity, an empty-filled tour guide of the country of the whale.

Yet for all his invisibility of self, Ishmael is omnipresent in the novel.  His voice is highly idiosyncratic, and it controls all observations and digressions.  He steers the ship; he points the spotlight.  How can we explain this?  How can Ishmael be invisible and also everywhere?  I found interesting answers in Harold Bloom and Gnosticism.  From www.gnosis.org:

a second characteristic of Gnosticism…says Bloom, “is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the self, and [this] knowledge leads to freedom….” Primary among all the revelatory perceptions a Gnostic might reach was the profound awakening that came with knowledge that something within him was uncreated. The Gnostics called this “uncreated self” the divine seed, the pearl, the spark of knowing: consciousness, intelligence, light. And this seed of intellect was the self-same substance of God…There was always a paradoxical cognizance of duality in experiencing this “self-within-a-self”. How could it not be paradoxical: By all rational perception, man clearly was not God, and yet in essential truth, was Godly.

From this we can define Melville/Ishmael’s journey as one of Gnostic self-knowledge, or gnosis.  Having witnessed traces of the uncreated self, he abandoned his life of affluence and comfort for a quest into the watery wastes, in search of a deeper knowing, of a more sensible emptiness.

Harold Bloom considers Gnosticism the religion of literature.  Here’s more illumination from the previous source:

Gnostic experience was mythopoetic: in story and metaphor, and perhaps also in ritual enactments, Gnosticism sought expression of subtle, visionary insights inexpressible by rational proposition or dogmatic affirmation. For the Gnostics, revelation was the nature of Gnosis.

Use this now to  read the apocryphal story of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, `I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out….He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.’

Jesus is Melville/Ishmael. His drink is the mythopoetic revelation called Moby-Dick, and, by engaging in his quest for knowing, hidden things are revealed to us. The character of Ishmael is, then, one that serves in the quest of self-knowledge.  He is a tool of the unification that is central to Gnostic teaching.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

All other quotes from: the Nag Hammadi Library