Moby Dick

As I was reading, a section of the text that stood out to me was chapter 115, “The Pequod meets the Bachelor”, and the two preceding ones, “The Forge” and “The Gilder.” Together, these chapters present the paradoxes in the crew’s relationship with the sea and with Ahab, demonstrating the depths of Ahab’s madness and the particular nature of the community on board. In “The Forge”, Ahab baptizes the three harpooners in the name of the devil, using the harpoon reserved for Moby Dick. Once again Melville clarifies the obsession and the crew’s entanglement with Ahab. After this brief but intense scene, chapter 114, “The Gilder”, is quiet and meditative, focused on the sea. As the Pequod settles into a rhythm, even though they are unsuccessful Ishmael notes that these are the times that whalers relax and enjoy the majesty of the ocean.

… These are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brillancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie…”

This introspective chapter focuses on the idea that to the whalers, the sea becomes like land to most people. It feels like home, a natural environment full of beauty. The danger that is often so close can seem so distant, and the mystical feeling that it inspires in the crew helps to partially explain why they were drawn to whaling. Starbuck and Stubb both also comment on the sea, Starbuck exclaiming, “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!- Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” Stubb, for his part, claims that “I am stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!” For Stubb and even the rational Starbuck, the sea is a powerful influence that they cannot hate regardless of the danger, for on some level being out at sea fulfills them.

At this point, the Pequod meets the Bachelor. The Bachelor, essentially a foil to the Pequod, has had remarkable luck resulting in a ridiculous amount of sperm on board, which translates directly into money and success at home.  Nantucket is also home for the Bachelor, and the crew and ship were exuberantly heading directly there. After the intensity of “The Forge” and the melencholy of “The Gilder”,

This glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge try-pots… On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft between the fore-mast and main-mast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig.

During this brief chapter, Melville tears down the massive edifice of the Pequod’s internal dynamics by offering such a stark contrast. There are even girls on the ship, opening up the omnipresent theme of masculinity on the Pequod. Ahab, of course, asks the captain about the White Whale. “‘No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,’ said the other good-humoredly. ‘Come aboard.'” Melville presents Ahab and his crew with a very clear alternative: forget about Moby Dick, embrace life, do your job, and go home. Ahab refuses, and Melville describes the “grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor” of the crew, which stands against the proclaimed love for the sea by those in the previous chapter. Even Ahab is revealed to still have a connection to Nantucket, for he carries a vial of sand with him. However, it appears that for Ahab at least that vial is enough to sustain his need for land and home. For the crew, these are moments of extreme conflict, as they are confronted by Ahab’s obsession, their draw to the sea, and their draw towards home. The Bachelor, as a chance encounter in the open sea, demonstrates that things are not necessarily fated towards disaster, but that men ultimately determine their own fate.

The disembodied and elusive spirit-spout might be seen as a metaphor for the elusive Moby Dick. It may also be viewed as the spirit of Moby Dick keeping tabs on the Pequod or trying to lead, misguide, or test the crew.

The spirit-spout may be seen as a malevolent, superstitious sign of the disappointment to come, and can be seen as especially mysterious or mystical because it is the mysterious, devilish Fedallah who first descried this jet.

As Ishmael describes the feelings and emotions with which the men behold this spirit-spout, we get an image of Ahab’s face one night, in which, “two different things were warring.” And there proceeds my favorite lines of the chapter when Ahab walks about the deck: “While his one live made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked” (249). Ahab is depicted to be an already half-dead man on a half-doomed mission. Like most mysterious observations, “Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.”

Do you know what the spirit-spout is? It is a tease. It is a false lead. It is that thing that keeps you going in your irrational direction. It is Moby Dick leading you to your doom. It is the reason you make up in your head to keep going. It keeps your mind off of the ridiculousness of what your doing, of where you’re going and what your are pursuing. It is what keeps you awake at night and makes you sick to your stomach when you look out across the sea to the horizon. It is captain Ahab’s insanity. It is Ishmael’s melancholy. It is Queequeg’s idol—his tiny black God. It is whatever drives your monomania and your manic depression. It is whatever guides your harpoon, your lance, your feet, your bow, your pen.

That is what the Spirit-Spout is, a figment of the imagination, though at relevant and real as the Pequod itself. That is why Ahab and his men follow it but will never find it. You see it once and never again. But once is enough to keep you on your compass course towards your unfortunate, untimely, death—your fate, as they so call it.

I previously posted about an instance in which Melville uses a footnote to describe the migratory patterns of sperm whales.   Stylistically this had struck me, as it was an interesting device to find used sparingly in the middle of the novel.  I noticed too how the narrator’s voice changed between the footnote and the rest of the text.  He sounded more authoritative on the nature of whales, referring to a scientific publication that appeared to be fictionalized.

Much later on in the book, there is notably another example of Melville’s use of a footnote to describe the habits of whales.  In the middle of the The Chase – First Day chapter (the bottom of page 537 in the Signet book), the narrator illustrates a maneuver of the whale in which the whale leaps into the air, as if to obtain a better vantage point of the area around him. I wonder how certain Melville himself felt about this reason for the whale’s breaching, or rather, if  people in his time commonly believed this.  One web page I’ve found lists other plausible explanations for breaching, and says that scientists are still speculative as to an exact reasoning.

Interestingly, the narrator says this is “peculiar” to sperm whales, which does not seem to be the case, as other types of whales, especially the humpback, are known to breach.

Here is a video of  a humpback’s impressive breaching:

You can see the great ocean swells that come after the whale hits the water, which Melville describes in the line before the footnote mentioned.

Of note, Melville does not refer to the whale’s leaping as “breaching,” but rather as “pitchpoling,” which is a dangerous type of capsizing, and is nicely illustrated here:

http://www.answers.com/topic/pitchpoling

“Pitchpoling” is the title of Chapter 84 in the book, but  is actually referring to the ship and not the whale.

In Chapter 132, The Symphony, Captain Ahab and his crew look out to the sky, which is filled with flying birds and a clear blue sky.  This view of the sky is depicted as peaceful and serene.  However, below the ocean lies the trouble and true danger.  The sharks, “mighty Leviathans” and swordfish lie there (page 774).  Also at this time, Captain Ahab begins to grow weary and fearful on his journey to kill the White Whale.  This fear from Captain Ahab goes against Christian faith because Christian faith states that one must not fear anything and one must have faith in their most dire and tiresome journeys.   Captain Ahab begins to lose his faith and therefore is losing his Christian faith as well.  “Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul” (775).  This quote shows how Captain Ahab begins to lose his strength and faith as it figuratively begins to sink into the abyss of the sea.  However, Captain Ahab also maintains some little faith as he enjoys smelling the scents in the air out on sea and this lovely scent purges that lack of faith from him. Interestingly enough he is both religious and irreligious because he struggles to completely maintain Christian faith and to relinquish Christian faith.  Captain Ahab even beings to cry into the sea.  Captain Ahab converses with Starbuck regarding his feelings and emotions.  Ahab says, “Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.  … But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise” (page 777).  This quotation reinforces the fact that Captain Ahab is truly feeling drained and exhausted from his long journey and quest to kill the White Whale.  Ahab also feels weary of this quest and begins to question whether or not he can fulfill his desire to exact revenge on the White Whale or to fulfill his desire of attaining peace and serenity.  The fact that Captain Ahab wavers between these two opposing sides shows that he is religiously duplicitous.

In Chapter 85, The Fountain, Ishmael explains the Sperm Whale’s spout, and proceeds to explain how the Sperm Whale has many features he admires, further elevating his opinion of the Sperm Whale and perhaps hinting at conservation, as we discussed in class.

As Ishmael explains, the Sperm Whale spouts when he surfaces to breathe. In a way, the whale’s spout is his achilles heel; the way whalers spot whales is usually by their spouts, and if a whale hadn’t surfaced whalers couldn’t harpoon them. Ishmael comments on this when he says “Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!” (359). This sentence humbles whalers. You are indebted to the whale and his anatomy, Ishmael seems to say, for if he didn’t need to surface you would never catch him at all.

Ishmael continues to tick off the features of the whale that he admires. He likes that whales don’t talk: “Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living” (360). His admiration culminates in his admiration of the whales as great thinkers, and he compares the whale spout to the “visible steam” above the heads of Plato, Pyrrho, etc. that comes from the activity of thinking hard, similar to the way his hair was wet because he had drank six cups of hot tea in August. This last comparison sounds ironic, but it is by his exagerration that Ishmael makes it clear how much he respects the Sperm Whales.

In terms of conservation, Ishmael includes how the whale’s spout is believed to be acidic and poisonous, and says that “the wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone” (361). This seems to  refer to Ahab’s stubborn pursuit of that which he knows to be harmful, with Ishmael suggesting that the wisest thing Ahab can to is to leave Moby Dick alone. I think that Ishmael also meant it as a conservationist message.  Even though Ishmael must kill the whales, he by no means thinks of himself as superior to them because he pursues them. He does not eve think of himself  as their equals. Rather, he is humbled by them, recognizing that it is only in their need to spout that he can hunt them, and furthermore, only in their existance that he can even define himself as a “whaler.”

Throughout “The Fountain,” Ishmael tells readers how they should be amazed and humbled the way he is by a beautiful and majestic creature. Reading this chapter after we discussed Melville’s desire to “save the whales,” or at least some of them, I feel that this was one chapter where Melville had conservation on his mind.