Moby Dick

In chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout”, the Pequod runs into a massive storm. For the whalers, nothing clarifies their predicament like the times when the sea is most dangerous.

In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then captain and crew become practical fatalists… Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted soldiers in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the blast.

The overwhelming power of the sea renders the men silent and fatalistic, as the possibility of death and the helplessness of man in the face of nature dominate the minds of the crew. Melville also links the sea to madness, demonstrating that it requires a certain degree to cope with such a devastating and common event while whaling. Ahab is portrayed as resolute, even sleeping while exposed to the storm because of his relentless defiance of the sea. Yet he clearly possesses no agency or ability to influence the sea or the storm, regardless of his declarations of being God and master of the Pequod. This  reminder of forces greater than Ahab and the wider world only occurs when nature intervenes on the ship. The single-mindedness of the Pequod’s and Ahab’s goal requires such a larger force in order to provide the perspective of madness that Melville cultivates in the crew. When the sea turns hostile, there is no possibility for Ahab to influence events either on the ship or in the sea. His manic obsession with the white whale does not diminish, but the reader and, one hopes, the crew, can see through the extreme example of the storm to the broader fact that the sea is ultimately in control of the Pequod’s fate, not the captain.

“Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye, come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my purpose is fixed with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.  Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents bed’s unerringly I rush!  Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”

For me, this passage really drove home just how serious and driven Ahab is on his quest for Moby Dick.  He describes this purpose as having a path that is already fixed with iron rails- he is saying that this is already what he had decided on and his mind cannot be changed.  Also, he says that his soul is running on this path- this tells us how determined and deeply devoted Ahab is to killing the white whale.  Ahab also makes it clear during this soliloquy that none of the men on the ship are going to be able to change his mind about this, he is letting it be known that he is the captain of this ship and his word goes.   During the last part of this passage, Ahab also lets us in on the how far he is willing to go and what he is willing to risk and go through in order to achieve his goal.

Even early in the book, the relationships between the men on the boat are very important to the story and the dynamics emerging in the relationships have a lot symbolism and metaphorical messages within them. We see at the end of chapter 10, the relationship and dynamic beginning to form between Ishmael and Queequeg…

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg- a cozy loving pair.”

I found this whole chapter very interesting, following Ishmael’s internal battle over sharing a bed with the harpooner he has yet to meet- a situation that most would probably find awkward and be wary of.  Though in the end, Ishmael decides to go ahead with it and Queequeg and he stay up most of the night smoking and chatting.  Be see the early stages of a profound bond being formed between these two men.  Once on the ship, the men will be heavily dependent on each other, and trust will most definitely be an important factor.  During this part of the book, Ishmael mentions that he is impressed by Queequeg’s dignity and kindness; two characteristics that are good to have in someone on whom you will be depending.  It struck me at this point that it is qualities like these that will determine status in the world upon the Pequod, not wealth or race.  It is also clear from the way that Ishmael describes himself and Queequeg as “a cozy loving pair” in their “hearts’ honeymoon” that Ishmael feels a connection with Queequeg and is open to new experiences with his new friend and in general about the whaling ship.

In chapter 51 (“The Spirit-Spout”), Ishmael discusses how nature compares to men and their voyage:

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow (210).

It’s intriguing how Ishmael (and seemingly the crew) seems almost to give the sea a personality and sense of agency. The sea, apparently, is aware of Ahab’s mission and is set on “vacating itself of life” so that nothing can be killed. This personification of the ocean is further reinforced by Ishmael’s description that the sea “heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred” (210). At times in this chapter the sea is described in direct contrast to the sailors’ moods, yet at other times it appears to directly influence the mood of the crew. Ishmael discusses the sea as a place of doom:

Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon (210).

It is fascinating to note how the sea (and nature) can be so filled with wide open promise and endless opportunity, but also can be a place akin to hell or purgatory, where one is doomed to roam for eternity. This is especially interesting when it is compared to Ishmael’s description of the sea in the first chapter. I wonder what a reader should understand about the sea through these various descriptions. Has Ishamel become disillusioned with sailing (thanks to Ahab)? Or has something else occurred here? Or is Ishmael (and Melville) allowing the sea to speak for him, by making it into another personality, another character in this novel?

In Chapter 70, entitled The Sphynx, Ishmael describes the process by which the massive head of a sperm whale is decapitated and hung alongside the Pequod, “buoyed up by its native element”, i.e. , floating in the water (249). Ishmael describes, “It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert” (249).  The Sphinx, in Egyptian mythology was looked upon as a guardian of temples and the secrets that lay within them. In Greek mythology the Sphinx was sent to Thebes by the the Gods and would pose a riddle to those who wished to pass by and would kill those who failed to answer correctly. The Sphinx is represented not only as a guardian but also as a bearer of wisdom.

Ahab stares over the side of the ship at the head of the whale. He begins to speak to the decapitated head as if it were “the Sphinx of the Seas”, so to speak, the keeper of some ancient and vast knowledge of the deep, and of the horrors which have unfolded within it. A knowledge which itself reveals real truth. Ahab says:

. . .Speak mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all the divers, thou hast dived the deepest . . . thou hast has been where bell or diver never went . . . Oh head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham . . .” (249).

The whale is conceived as something which has persisted throughout the ages and has come to an understanding of the intricacies of our world’s mechanisms; they have come to see and grasp the way in which the inner-cogs governing the its functioning.  Ahab, representative of mankind, deeply desires and struggles fruitlessly to attain this wisdom, admits that if even the most righteous man (e.g., Abraham) were to ever gain insight into these truths, he would be driven to evil. The attaining of the unattainable would be catastrophic. Although… doesn’t the search itself lead man partake in evil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx

In ‘The Blacksmith’, Ishmael expands upon his understanding of the sea as an escape from the troubles of life.  When death seems the only possible place left to go, Perth (like Ishmael) finds the sea.  Similar to the opening paragraph of the novel in which he discusses his own reasons for going to sea, in this chapter, Ishmael gives us Perth’s reasons, based on his “wretched” life on land.   Prior to boarding the Pequod, Perth was “robbed” of his happy life, owing in large part to alcoholism.  He lost his family and his home, and “staggered off a vagabond in crape” (Melville 468).  Though his life was seemingly lost, he was not able to commit suicide—the blank slate of the sea beckoned him.  It was a submittal to a different kind of death, “a life which, to [his] now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, [was] more oblivious than death” (468).

The sea attracted Ishmael for similar reasons; the oblivion of the sea provided him grounds for deep thought and reflection.  But the seas barrenness also brings man a simplicity to his life, which can pervade even his mind.  Without the many complexities of life on land, a man (such as Perth) can be stripped down to his barest form.

Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart” (466)

In embodying the hammer, Perth truly left his “landed world” behind.  His broken heart brought him to sea, and then turned into a tool.  The sea didn’t restore his life, or his heart, instead it simplified it so much that it became wholly unnecessary for him to be anything more than his work.  He’s entered into a transitory state—he’s ceased living, but because he’s not dead either, he can only do those most basic functions, biding what time the sea chooses to give him.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

One does not often think that a creature still has the power to influence the living after it is already dead. What I have noticed a number of times throughout Moby Dick, is that there are a couple of occasions where creatures, usually the whale, can continue to influence the living after it is already dead. Set aside the fact that many parts of the whale are used by humans (oil, blubber, bones) after it had been killed, the dead whale still has the ability to instil fear in the living.  In the chapter The Funeral, Ishmael explains how once released back into the sea, the body of the whale still has an impact on those who sail the ocean, when he says:

“Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war, or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fouls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log—shoals, rocks and breakers hereabouts: beware!” (Melville 300)

While this is a more perceived danger that instils fear in sailors, the dead whale can also pose a real danger to those that kill it. In the chapter The Shark Massacre we see that numerous sharks surround the whale attached to the ship and attempt to devour the carcass. In an attempt to protect the whale carcass, the crew pokes at the swarming sharks with spades. During this process, Ishmael remarks that “It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures.” (Melville 293) Right after he thinks this, Queequeg brings the corpse of a dead shark on board (to be used for its skin) and almost looses his hand on the shark’s sharp teeth. Like the whale, the shark has the power to hurt and to harm the living even after his death.

I find this power and influence over the living world even after death to be an interesting concept and one that seems to be possessed by the whale throughout the novel. As Ishmael says on page 300, “Thus while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to the world.” (Melville)

In Chapter 48, The First Lowering, Flask stands on Daggoo’s shoulders. A momentous, earth-shattering occasion. Well, almost. It depends on how deeply we read into the event. Interpretations could run the gamut, anywhere from “Melville is showing that blacks can be used anywhere for anything!” to  “this is a metaphor for black superiority.” In between these extremes, we stumble upon the idea that this episode is a metaphor for American slavery. Several quotes from the chapter evidence this viewpoint, the first of which is an exchange between Daggoo and Flask:

“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”

“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller.”, [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

How greedy! Little flask here gets a combined height of well over eleven feet, and yet he wants fifty more. One need not delve too deeply to see how this compares to American slavery. Here, an empowered yet diversely inferior white authority figure is using a black for his own ends, and then simply asks for more. Just as blacks were driven harder and harder in the South, more and more is asked of Daggoo without reward (though he is thanked at least). One could argue that Flask is only joking, but is it not so that there is a little truth behind every joke?

Melville points out this “poetic injustice” a few pages later when he writes that

…for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

Daggoo is a paragon of physical prowess. His muscles work in perfect conjunction, enabling him to remain stable as he supports a white man in a rocking boat. Unless my high school education has misguided me, I recall that a rocking boat was a metaphor for prewar America. Their differences irreconcilable, abolitionists and slave-owners at every moment risked capsizing the boat, or driving the country to war. In the middle stands the innocent negro, who, despite turbulent waters, remains steady and, ironically, it is this strength that made slavery so profitable and thus worth fighting for. Here Melville is praising blacks for their strength and fortitude, a trend he continues onto the next page:

So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that. [Herman Melville, Moby Dick]

This passage reminds me of the negro gospels African slaves sang in the American South. The tone is one of resilience. It seems to say “You can try to destroy us, but we’re here to stay.” Interestingly, whites are the vain ones while blacks are the earth—immortal, beautiful, and giving. In the end, Melville implies, cream rises to the top and, someday, they will be our equals.

Chapter 87. “The Grand Armada” begins with a description of the Pequod’s surroundings, namely the straits of Sunda, a known whaling haven that contains not only the danger of the seas but also of the local inhabitants. Melville clearly delineates an East vs. West binary, where the actual physical landscape “should bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world.” While he dismisses the Western tradition of homage in sailing past foreign land, and credits the locals in Southeast Asia with ignoring this idea, he presents the culture as one of savagery and piracy. However, his anti-Western rhetoric suggests that their actions are in some ways valid, though they still serve as an additional danger to the crew of the Pequod.

Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.

In the context of these external pressures, Melville describes how a whaling ship, devoid of cargo and singleminded in its pursuit of leviathons, manages such a long trip among hostile conditions.

She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities… She carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafter off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone to China from New York and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves.

The sea dominates the novel, but as a source of water it is utterly useless. With the dangers inherent in landing for supplies, it makes more sense to carry a massive amount of water from your home port. On one hand, this adds to both the community of the ship as well as the pressure on that community to coexist without taking breaks from constant travel on the sea. On the other hand, this reference to Nantucket and the home port somewhat contradicts  the nature of those on board. The water may be palatable and the preference while at sea, but many in the crew are aboard because of the escape that whaling provides and the unique motivations that drive them away from the safety of land. In their most basic needs, however, they do rely exclusively on Nantucket water. These background passages by Melville serve to further define the community of the whale-ship, and its relationship to one place in particular when “the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world.”

In class we were reminded not to view “gender” as solely “female” and I think it is particularly important in this novel, given how there are simply no women on board this three year journey, to try and pull out the subtle and complex composition of gender aboard the Pequod. We have already explored in part the interesting interplay of feminine and masculine characteristics that exist within individual characters, such as Queequeg, but this presence of both genders co-existing within a crew of all men only seems to grow as the story progresses. It seems that the crew, who left their wives at home and ventured out, brave and daring into a task made only for the strongest of men, are now forced to shift over in time into a balance that requires the effeminate, the nurturing and even the homoerotic to come into view. A Squeeze of the Hand is one of the best and most entertaining examples of this, however as we discussed the chapter extensively I don’t feel the need to go into detail. I would just add to our discussion the somewhat obvious idea that while the chapter is clearly homoerotic, it seems a clear expression not of repressed homosexuality but of the pure sense of desire and sexual need that exists in humanity which here is coming forth despite the absence of women (the acceptable outlet for such desires of these men), and is directed without question or hindrance towards other men. In this way, though Melville for the most part appears to blend gender not into a neutral state but rather by incorporating pure elements of each into a constant tug-of-war, here appears to allow gender to be removed almost and human nature to be simply human nature.

There are many ways to read a novel and I have found myself in reading moments that appear to be primarily a commentary on race as suggesting something equally bold as gender roles or perhaps simply masculinity. Take, for instance, the moment in The First Lowering when Daggoo hoists Flask up upon his shoulders:

“…the gigantic negro, presented his flat palm to Flask’s foot, and…landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders…[T]he noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow flake” (p. 214)

This description, and others, seem to place Daggoo, Queequeg and the other non-white crew members on a level of higher masculinity in their physical forms and intense strength and skill; Flask is clearly both weaker and more effeminate here, described as “flaxen-haired” and resembling a snowflake. Of course this assignment of masculinity is not purely flattering – Daggoo is almost animalistic here, being ridden by the white man, but the measly quality of Flask’s size and manly presence is hardly flattering either and is clearly evident.

This idea of a hierarchy that creates elements of masculinity and effeminacy is not only present in the distinction between the races aboard, of course, but exists as well in the assertion of power and control in the established ranks on the ship. We can see this actually in the story of the Town-Ho when Radney tries to assert his authority by demanding Steelkilt sweep the deck – a job that is “the prescriptive province of the boys” (p. 240), and which is a “trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties”. Sweeping in a very stereotypical manner is seen classically as a woman’s chore and here on the deck is considered similarly a sort of “tidying of the house” kind of job. This, coupled with the idea that it is removed from the true duties of the ship and of whaling (which we already know are the duties of men) suggests a real blow to ones masculinity; this is clear also in the fact that while I won’t argue boys are seen as a feminine presence, they certainly are less masculine given they have not passed through puberty. In this way, gender and masculinity is a constant push and pull within the hierarchies both racially and through authoritative position.