Moby Dick

For all its florid prose and general lack of literary discipline, Melville’s writing often resembles some of the most affecting religious rhetoric I’ve ever heard. In the last paragraph of chapter forty-two, when Ishmael seemingly relates whale, God, heathen, color, nature, and philosophy with the unifying principle of whiteness—he preaches. He is sermonizing. One characteristic particular to the sermon (other than religious content) is the invocation of the congregation; the most effective sermons have some kind of central theme on which the speaker will indirectly entreat an audience to meditate, by way of imagery, metaphors, parallels, related scripture, etc. By creating several powerful, beautiful images into which he weaves themes of religion and colorlessness, Melville makes a sermonic plea to his audience through Ishmael to entertain a particular interpretation of the whiteness of the whale.

One of the most overtly religious suggestions in the passage comes in the form of a question addressed by Ishmael to the reader:

Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? (175)

The question itself makes an obvious request of the reader, if not for an answer, for at least a consideration. However, therein lies the problem; Melville here presents the reader with an impossible paradox to digest. The idea of simultaneous color and colorlessness is not something empirically observable in the natural world, and as a result, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the concept extended visually to an infinite blanket of snow. Thus, the reader’s immediate reaction might be to “shrink” away from such an inherently contradictory image, before the question is even asked. Given the effect of the image, then, the reader is more likely to accept the implication of Ishmael’s rhetorical question: “we” avoid at all costs anything impossibly paradoxical. The mention of atheism after the em-dash seems almost a logical leap, or at least an unqualified parallel. However, it comes across in analysis as an attempt by Ishmael (and, by extension, Melville) to, now that the reader has already been given something he or she can accept, get him or her to agree to something that might indeed be unrelated. Many an effective sermon will follow this same practice: incite fear or confusion by presenting an audience with some grave improbability, win them back with some easily digested and relatable conclusion, and—when their guard is down—slip in something vaguely controversial. Melville sets his audience up for confusion, comforts them for “shrinking” from it, and somehow implies their adversity to atheism.

This passage (paragraph, even) would take me volumes to explore, but my space here is limited, so I’ll stick briefly to one more quotation. Ishmael begins to close his lengthy dissertation on whiteness with something that sounds oddly like a myth or parable:

[L]ike wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.

Instead of invoking the reader, Ishmael fills out this second snow-related image with several anonymous characters in a bleakly exotic landscape. With this situation-as-metaphor, instead of seeking the reader’s acceptance, Ishmael seems to assume the reader’s total investment in his words. By this point, he makes the religious aspect of his argument clear by casting the “protagonists” of his metaphor as no different from infidels. Ishmael seems to have become more comfortable, by this sentence in the paragraph, with the religious implications of his musings, and so incorporates religion far more liberally into his language.  The image he paints and situation he describes have a clear pro-religious agenda, like that of a Christian parable: simply put, whiteness, like religious infidelity, is something beautifully tempting, but with dire consequences. Why dress up such a simple message? The only answer seems to be form; like any Christian sermon, Ishmael’s words mustn’t say anything about whiteness. Via ornamented metaphors, they have to show it.

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