The mark of Shakespeare on Moby Dick is plain, not only in borrowed phrases—the “tiger’s heart” and countless others—but in stage directions for chapters (“Enter Ahab: then all—Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him”), in the soliloquies (Ahab in the manner of Macbeth), and in subtler ways. The Epilogue announces, in Shakespearean style, “The drama’s done.” Some critics have found a structure like the five acts of an Elizabethan play, though others compare its design with the Books of the Odyssey or of The Lusiads. And the continual interlacing of the slow oceanic narrative with encyclopedic fragments leaves the reader free to find his own pattern.
Melville had industriously researched his subject. “I have swam through libraries,” he recalled, but he also bought books, and finally, in addition to his own experience, he relied on a few of the best-known works in English on whales, whaling, and whaling voyages. He was confident enough of the dramatic appeal of his book to interrupt the story with minitreatises on taxonomic cetology, on the form and dimensions of the whale’s head, tail, and skeleton, on its habits, history, legends, and fossils, along with the craft and technology of harpooners, blacksmiths, and carpenters, and facts on instruments of navigation, the quadrant, compass, the long and line.
He appears to have been aware, too, that the developing science of psychology was providing a new vocabulary for describing the kind of madness he would depict in Ahab. The pioneer British psychiatrist James C. Prichard (1786–1848) in 1833 introduced into English “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” Chief Justice Shaw, Melville’s father-in-law-to-be had handed down an opinion in 1844 defining monomania as cases where “the conduct may be in many respects regular, the mind acute” and at the same time there may be insane delusions.… The mind broods over one idea and cannot be reasoned out of it.” Melville had used “monomania” in Mardi, and in Moby Dick he would describe Ahab’s “final monomania.” All of this had helped him set the stage for the manic quest and the climactic encounter with the White Whale.
The book was published in London in October 1851 and the next month in America. Dedicated to Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius,” it was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Because he still owed Harper’s, his New York publisher, seven hundred dollars of unearned advances on his earlier books in April 1851, they had refused to give him a new advance on this one. He was pinched for money, but managed to borrow two thousand dollars from a friend. “Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne in June, “and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.… What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”
The book that so dissatisfied Melville and did not charm his contemporaries would have an uncanny appeal to generations in the next century. That appeal came not only from his resonant Shakespearean eloquence and the grandeur of the adventure, but also from the book’s rough-hewn structure and its challenging ambiguity. Melville sensed this, as he concluded one of his longest—and surely his most “systematic”—chapters on cetology.
But I now leave my Cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Melville’s grand sea metaphor—like the exotic settings of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear—was wonderfully suited to allow each future reader to make his own copestone. Three quarters of a century would pass before the common reader discovered this opportunity. Had the whale not been a whale—so legendary and biblical a beast for the reading public—it might not have been so easy to invent one’s own versions of the book.
Or had Ahab been depicted with more human nuance, in the manner of the realistic novel, Ahab might have been a less apt vehicle for our varied hopes and fears. There was ambiguity, also, in the very name of “Ahab.” In history Ahab, the seventh king of Israel (c.875–853 B.C.), married Jezebel and, without abandoning Yahweh himself, allowed her idolatrous religion of the Phoenician Baal to be practiced in Israel and encouraged her idolatrous cult. Then in the contest that Elijah arranged between the prophets of Baal and those of Yahweh (I Kings 18:19–46) Yahweh was established as “God in Israel.” And Ahab, a dubious champion in the historic battle between God and the religion of idols, remained a symbol of all our inner uncertainties.
Moby Dick, it has often been observed, is not really a novel, for it lacks the development and conflict of characters. From the opening sentence the focus is on the troubled self:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
There are no women in the story. Despite its abundance of facts, it is not realistic fiction but a poetic or mythic epic. Though Melville had written documentary polemics on the miseries of seamen and the tyranny of their officers, we do not see this in Moby Dick, which tells of not one flogging. Qualities that prevent it from being a modern realistic novel actually suit it to be a versatile epic vehicle for the modern self in quest of itself. The name of Ishmael, which he has taken, recalls the not entirely legitimate son of Abraham by an Egyptian concubine, who would be hailed by Muslims as an ancestor of Mohammed and be buried in the Kaaba in Mecca.
The story has a Homeric simplicity—the relentless monomaniac sea captain seeking revenge against a monster. Captain Ahab, who stalks the deck of the Pequod with an ivory leg in place of the one that the White Whale has taken from him, never deviates from his one purpose. We know almost nothing of him except the one earlier consuming misadventure. The cetology and vivid specifics of whales and whaling in the first three quarters of the 135 short chapters of the long book are interrupted only by occasional encounters with passing vessels, to whom Ahab’s one question is “Hast thou seen the White Whale?” Episodes of Ahab’s impatience and rage show him shattering the quadrant that has refused to take him to his quarry, destroying his trusty but unproductive compass, and turning to dead reckoning with log and line. But he also rashly loses the rudimentary log and line needed for calculating speed and position. And there are omens: the cabin boy, Pip, who goes mad after an ordeal afloat alone, the mysterious Saint Elmo’s light that transforms the three masts into incandescent candles. All leading to three climactic days of encounter and chase of the White Whale.
The few personalities described, apart from Ishmael’s self-description, are caricatures: the three mates—prudent and cautious Starbuck, carefree Stubb, obtuse but professional Flask; and the exotic harpooners—Polynesian Queequeg, American Indian Tashtego, and African Daggoo. All play their roles as allegories.
But who really is Ahab? He emerges slowly at the beginning and only occasionally later. Before he appears we are warned of that man who “makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.… For all men tragically great are made so through
a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” To Captain Peleg, who knew him, “He’s a grand, ungodly, godlike man.” An earlier whaling encounter gave Ahab reason enough for his morbidness:
And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more felt for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with a heart and half a lung.… He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
While Ahab’s need for revenge may have been sound, the act of vengeance was far from godly. As the blacksmith forges the harpoon barbs, tempered in the blood of Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, the three harpooners, Ahab deliriously howls, “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”
Ahab in one of the most familiar passages reminds us that we can each seek in Moby Dick what each of us wants to find.
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! to be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
“Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!…”
So too each of us is served by the doubloon Ahab has posted as a reward for sighting the White Whale. “And this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man but mirrors back his own mysterious self.”
The central mystery of Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick is the mystery of the self. “Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” Here is no buried treasure, but only grassy glades and “ever vernal landscapes in the soul.”
The story ends in an ocean of ambiguities. After three days of encounter and chase, Moby Dick destroys the whaleboats, Ahab is fouled in the line and tied to Moby Dick, who staves and sinks the Pequod. Only Ishmael—the self—escapes, supported by the Pequod’s life buoy, which had been made from a coffin. By floating to the “vital centre” of the vortex, Ishmael avoids being sucked down with the sinking Pequod. “The unharming sharks, they glide by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks.” He is rescued on the second day by “the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search for her missing children, only found another orphan.”
Melville never recovered from the effort of writing Moby Dick, which he said had been “broiled in hell-fire.” From Hawthorne he received a letter of appreciation, to which he responded that “A sense of unspeakable security is on me this moment, on account of your having understood the book.” His reference to “security” was ominous.
He continued to write, but what he wrote might not have survived had they not been written by the author of Moby Dick. And his next book, a token of uncertainty, was titled Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852). This is a semimystical, semiautobiographical tale of a wealthy young man who pretends to marry his illegitimate half-sister, writes an unpublishable book, kills his own cousin, and then commits suicide with his true love. To add to Melville’s discouragement, a fire at Harper’s consumed the stock of his books. No longer the celebrity who had lived among the cannibals, he was now a forgotten—or ridiculed—writer in search of a way to support his family.
In vain he sought a government post, preferably a consulship, with the aid of Judge Shaw and Hawthorne, who was a friend of President Franklin Pierce. Melville managed somehow by the generosity of friends and relatives to meet the pressing financial needs of his family. But he would never again have the satisfaction of earning his own living as a writer. Within five years he would give up his effort to write for the book-buying public. Meanwhile he wrote Israel Potter (1855), based on an anonymous book published thirty years before retailing the adventures of a New England boy who joins the Revolutionary army, is captured by the British, takes part in naval intrigues and battles, meets the Revolutionary celebrities, returns home, fails to secure a pension and dies in poverty. Melville turned to writing short stories, brought together in The Piazza Tales (1856), including the remarkable and still readable “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Then, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857), his last novel published in his lifetime, tells a puzzling unfinished satirical tale of a trickster who boards a Mississippi steamboat in the guise of a deaf mute, and in a series of roles, tests the goodwill and trustfulness of his fellow passengers.
Seeing him on the verge of a “breakdown,” Melville’s family sent him on a trip to Europe and the Near East, paid for by Judge Shaw, hoping to relieve his tensions. The limited psychiatric vocabulary of the period could not provide a name for his disability, nor any remedy. He stopped in Liverpool to see Hawthorne, who noted Melville’s need “to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was.… Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken.”
He informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation, and I think will never rest until he gets hold of some definite belief. It is strange how he persists … in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.
Melville said the spirit of adventure had gone out of him. But he showed uncertainty even about this by leaving his trunk behind at the Hawthornes’ and taking only a carpetbag, recalling his old South Sea days when he carried nothing more than a shirt and duck trousers.
This was their last intimate meeting, and a reminder that still another hope, his wish for a lifelong solacing friendship with his ideal spiritual companion, would not be realized. This trip to the Holy Land via Italy and Egypt did not produce solace or any new certainties. When Melville returned home he was still “a pondering man.” For three seasons he tried lecturing—on “Statues in Rome,” “The South Seas,” and “Traveling”—which brought neither money nor applause. Then an inheritance on Judge Shaw’s death provided the funds to move the family back to New York. Finally, he turned to poetry, and published Battle-Pieces (1866), on Civil War themes, which made little impression. His irrational behavior to his family, on whom he vented his frustrations, led his wife, recalling Allan Melville’s last days, to fear that Herman, too, had gone mad.
In 1866 he finally received a government post—not the remote romantic consulship in Hawaii but the prosaic job of deputy inspector of customs, around the corner from his house in New York City. His eldest son, Malcolm, committed suicide at the age of eighteen in 1867. In hours stolen from his routine Melville wrote a monumental epic poem of eighteen thousand lines (two volumes, published in 1876 with a bequest from his uncle). This was a tale of an American theology student, Clarel, w
ho goes to Jerusalem in search of faith, there encounters the lengthy confessions and doubts of a Roman Catholic, an Anglican, and a Jew, and finally suffers the tragic death of his beloved. New legacies made it possible for Melville to retire from the Custom House in 1886. He wrote more poems and left unfinished a short cryptic novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, which ends in the unjust hanging of the sailor hero, for his rebellious murder of an evil petty officer. This has provided critics with the Christological symbolism for endless speculation on Melville’s faith. It was not published till 1924.
When Melville died in 1891, there were no praising obituaries, for he had been forgotten. Only a few years before, an English writer seeking him in New York, was puzzled that “No one seemed to know anything of the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent.” But long before, Melville had taken the precaution of justifying his obscurity. Since “all Fame is patronage,” he had written, “let me be infamous.” He continued to find reasons to discount the reward that had eluded him. “The further our civilization advances upon its present lines, so much the cheaper sort of thing does ‘fame’ become, especially of the literary sort.” While Melville could disparage fame, he could not prevent it. The unaccountable resurrection of Melville began with the centennial of his birth in 1919, which brought articles and numerous editions of all his works. The first full-length biography, by Raymond A. Weaver, appeared in 1921. But the materials were meager, because Melville had burned his letters from Hawthorne, and his family had expurgated their papers for the period of his deepest depression.
Into Moby Dick twentieth-century American readers would pour their own frustrations and ambiguities, making it one of the most popular vehicles for the modern self. To acknowledge Hawthorne’s praise of Moby Dick, Melville had written, “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.” In Melville’s ship of ambiguities each twentieth-century reader would seek that piece of the self.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 92