Moby Dick

Similar to rymosser, I noticed quite clearly the strange power of the sea in the Spirit Spout chapter but in a different place;  while they remarked early in their post on the incredible danger and uncontrollable power of nature and of the sea rendering the men silent, for me, I found it fascinating that the absence of activity and the silence in this chapter create both extreme calm and extreme apprehension:

“These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which…there lurked a devilish charm…all space seemed vacating itself of life before our…prow. But, at last…the Cape winds began howling around us…then all this vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.” (p. 226)

This passage in my mind mirrors the narrators thought from earlier: “…there reigned…a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were treachorously beckoning us on…in order that the monster might turn round upon us.” In both of these, there is such a bizarre relationship with nature and the peace of the sea. With the spirit spout, the crew feels perpetually led on, teased; they appear to WANT to reach this spout which they beleive must belong to Moby Dick. Yet the prospect of being suddenly right by the whale’s side and its aggression is not only frightening, it collapses time and space so that one minute the spout is blowing by the horizon, the next we have the image of a fierce attacking whale right at the ship’s side. In a way this upholds the idea of something inhuman and divine about the spirit spout which even at a distance seems to play with space and time. This fear of the whale suddenly bearing down upon the Peqoud is the darker element of the whale’s godly power. But at a distance or within reach- which is worse? This is the same question with the weather. The calm, serene emptiness, the vacuity of sea stretching before them is a torment, it seems almost unbearable, yet when the storm comes and we beleive it will be a releif, that it mimght fill the crushing void for these men, the narrator/Ishmael suggests it is only more “dismal than before”. In this way, our sense of balance and even of reality is shifted: rather than ‘good’ and ‘bad’ existing in contrast to each other, the levels of despair and misfortune only extend downward. And this, again, in my opinion, can be interpreted back in the spatial relationship of ship and whale: with Moby Dick at a distance and the expanse of calm sea in between, the men are caught in a perpetual, terrifying and frustrating purgatory, yet the alternative appears perhaps far worse.

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