Moby Dick

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.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS