Feb 01 2010
Ishmael and the Gnostic Self
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
2 Responses to “Ishmael and the Gnostic Self”
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Andrew, you raise an interesting concept here. I wonder: what led you to Gnosticism and the Gnostics? How did you make the leap from the Gnostics to Ishmael? Granted, it’s not a far leap to make, but I was wondering about the provenance of your interest in the Gnostics, and what similarities prompted you to write a comparative post. I am also intrigued by your comparison of Ishmael to Jesus — Jesus never wrote his own narrative, so although he is a presence in the Gospels, he is never the writer of his own story. Therefore, I have a tougher time accepting this argument, and I perhaps need more persuasion.
Ishmael could be perceived as Jesus-like in the sense that he did not write his own narrative, either. He is a fictional character that Herman Melville created in order to tell a story and send a specific message (or rather, many messages) to its readers. Similarly, the story of Jesus was fictionalized by several different people in order to get across their specific agendas (as in, the Gospel of John differs from that of Matthew in that they wrote it at different times and under different influences- I’m not trying to offend anyone by asserting that Jesus was fictional). As the character Jesus was a martyr for “his” beliefs in the Gospels (i.e. the beliefs the authors’), so Ishmael may be for Melville’s if Moby Dick bests him in the end (but I won’t give away the ending…). Just thought I’d contribute, here, because I recently read the Gospels for another class of mine and have Jesus on the brain.