by May, Rollo
On the third day (the phenomenon is parallel with the last three days in the crucifixion of Christ), when the Great White Whale is again struck with harpoon after harpoon,
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack. But maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.
Ahab cries,
“Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour yet now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…. while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, 1 give up the spear!”†
And Ahab hurls his last harpoon. He is driven so crazy by his passion for vengeance that he leaps upon the whale’s body and is entwined to the whale’s back by his very own ropes. He sinks below the ocean waters, drowning in the great ocean of his hatred.
But this is not all. Infuriated, the white whale then attacks the ship. It lifts the prow high in the air and breaks the ship asunder. “Great God, where is our ship!” cried the men.
Moby Dick then fiercely drives the boats with the men clinging to them under the water. Then he attacks the stern, turning it on end so that it too sinks below the ocean’s surface.
and so the bird of heaven, with angelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her….
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.*
The epilogue begins with a quotation from Job, uttered by Ishmael as he floats on a log:
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee….
“The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.
“It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men where tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunken ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool.… Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”*
CATHARSIS IN THE STRUGGLE WITH EVIL
Like all great myths in literature, Moby Dick performs the task of giving the reader—indeed giving posterity—a catharsis from excessive anxiety and guilt. This we see in the experience of participation in a profoundly creative experience.
Henry Murray writes that for him reading Moby Dick is like listening to Beethoven’s Eroica. In reading the mythic tale, we feel cleansed as if by a great religious experience, the destruction of Ahab, the embodiment of the devil. The world and life have a deeper quality that reaches down into a person’s soul below even the customary “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Love and joy and death confront one another in these depths of emotion.
In a letter to Hawthorne after he had finished Moby Dick, Melville wrote, “I have written a wicked book.” Then when he heard that Hawthorne understood and liked it, he wrote back, “I feel like a new-born baby!” He had experienced the catharsis that one feels in creating something beautiful. The feeling is not just a “victory” over the devil or a wiping out of evil—these by themselves would lead only to sentimentality. It is rather the catharsis of feeling cleansed through one’s battle with the devil, one’s struggle with the recalcitrant words until one is able to express the vision in his or her own heart and mind. It was a cleansing of the fierce discord with the devil.
Not that the devil will not come back again. But rather that the author has learned in his struggle with the daimonic that he, the creative person, can meet evil and make of it something joyous, beautiful, and health giving. One never finishes this battle once and for all. Goethe struggled for forty years before working out a creative ending for the last half of his Faust.
Melville’s Moby Dick was written as an attack on the narrow, life-stifling, dark, and cruel repressions of Puritanism, which still festered in some of the churches and religion of New England. It was the same spirit which earlier had caused the burning of the “witches” at Salem. The name of the whaling ship, Pequod, was the name of a fierce tribe of Indians the New Englanders had exterminated, and it was this push toward extermination that carried over in New England to become what Melville attacked.
The dull, snowbound coldness of Melville’s father and the quiet sweetness of his mother whom he never fully knew—these were some of the source of Melville’s super-ego and of his dedication to these mythic depths. Freud suggests that continuous aggression is a sign of lack of eros; this lack characterizes the kind of Puritanism Melville attacked.
Such is the mythic catharsis of which every creative artist partakes. It is not surprising that the artists feel it in their own minds and hearts; their destiny requires they give it to others, to share with others the emotional wars and eruptions of which Melville writes. With Moby Dick Melville joins the great writers of the middle and last half of the nineteenth century—Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and several decades later Freud and Spengler. All of them saw that the error of the Enlightenment was that it lacked a devil.
God is ultimately triumphant in Moby Dick, Satan’s forces are vanquished, as it was foreseen on ancient Olympus. The victory is hard won, and the price of the life-and-death struggles ending in the sentence, as is the case in Moby Dick, “And I alone am left to tell the story.” The mythic devil here stands for enduring the earthquakes and the volcanos which exude their fire and brimstone, but Good and Evil go on forever.
“Some may wonder how it was that Melville,” writes Murray, “a fundamentally good, affectionate, noble, idealistic, and reverential man, should have felt impelled to write a wicked book.”* Why did he aggress so furiously against Western orthodoxy, as furiously as Byron and Shelley, or any satanic writer who preceded him, as furiously as Nietzsche or the most radical of his successors in our day? These are questions we continually ask and never can answer. But in the asking is the catharsis.
I see this novel as an expression of the myth of wars between Good and Evil, when the character of Satan is a rehearsal of the wars of the gods, before Oedipus puts out his eyes or Prometheus suffers in bringing primitive man his learning, before Athena meets the daimonic in the Oresteia, before Socrates drinks his hemlock. Here is Satan, here are the necessary wars of the spirit. The eternal wars continue. As Joan of Arc hangs burning at the stake in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, she cries out the great question, “How long, O Lord, how long?” This cry will be heard as long as people have the awareness of God and Satan, for out of this struggle come the qualities that make us human. Out of these depths comes great literature. We will never see it wiped away. The battle as shown in this myth still goes on as long as we are human and still gives us our most profound and joyful experiences.
PART IV
MYTHS FOR SURVIVAL
SIXTEEN
The Great Circle of Love
The state of mind which enables a man to do this kind of work [science] is akin to that o
f the religious worshipper or the lover.
Albert Einstein
LIBERATION OF WOMEN
They are—the Mothers.
Faust (starting)… Mothers!
Mephistopheles: Are you awed?
Faust: The Mothers! Why, it strikes a singular chord.
Goethe, Faust
In preceding chapters we observed that the chauvinistic Peer Gynt tried to find himself by gallivanting around the earth. But he became increasingly more desperate until he confronted death. He finally finds his genuine self only in the presence of Solveig and her feminine love.
We have seen also in the myth of Briar Rose that the liberation of the princess did not occur for those unlucky princes who exhibited only sheer male strength in trying to hack their way through the thick hedges. But it did come in the presence of the prince who did not force his way, the one who engaged in creative waiting until the hedge and thorns opened by themselves, when he and the princess could be genuinely present to each other.
In other myths, such as Goethe’s Faust, the struggle of the myth is present if not resolved, namely, the myth of the equality of men and women.
In each of these dramas the liberation of both woman and man is possible only when each achieves a new myth of the other sex, leading to a new significant psychological relationship. They are both then liberated from their previous empty and lonely existence. The woman and the man find their true selves only when they are fully present to each other. They find they both need each other, not only physically but psychologically and spiritually as well.
In the Reformation a large part of our Western world became Protestant, and the Mother of Jesus was emphatically given a back seat, as is shown in the architecturally beautiful but barren churches of New England. Where was the Catholic Mariology with its warm, feminine art? It does not require brilliance to see the witch trials in Europe and America in this fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as overt attacks against the women of those countries. The most basic consideration is that the two principles of rationalism and individualism, the myths on which the modem age is founded, are chiefly male, left-brain activities.
The age of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was geared as well to male habits. Men ventured forth into the universe; women took care of the hearth at home. The Industrial Revolution consisted of heavy and powerful machines, which again appealed particularly to men. Imagine a woman in that day driving Goethe’s locomotive from Bath to Liverpool! Ours is the age when capitalism flourished, with its factories and huge engines that could be manipulated by men and, until recently, only by men. These conditions left many women in the role of the stepchildren of our modern age. We surely were in need of an Ibsen to write A Doll’s House in the last of the nineteenth century, showing what evils this period could do to the feminine half of our race.
One of the main reasons Alfred Adler withdrew from the group that met at Freud’s house every Wednesday evening in the first decade of this century was that he differed with Freud’s view of women. Freud had taken a condescending attitude toward women, using the Victorian method of flattery; he referred to them as the “fair sex,” the “tender ones,” and on that basis he understandably could never find an answer to his question, What do women want? Adler, on the contrary, said many times in different ways that “civilization will never be complete as long as one half of the people in it are considered inferior.”
Otto Rank, following Adler’s example, also withdrew from Freud’s inner group, even though the master was proud of Rank and his work and gossip had it that Rank had been groomed for succession to Freud’s throne. Disagreeing radically with Freud’s broad references to women’s problems by the derogatory term “penis envy,” Rank believed that what motivates a woman is her “emotional and spiritual … craving for expression of her true woman-self in a masculine world which has no room or use for her.”* Rank believed that the end result of psychoanalysis should be that the patient fulfill himself and herself. Rank used the term “self-realization” before any of us in America used it. He also emphasized “identity confusion” twenty years before Erik Erikson used the term, and he regarded sexism, the prejudice against women, as a “cultural disease.”
Rank understood remarkably well the difficult position in which our culture placed women. He wrote in 1939 that the woman
must feel in this man-made world … not unlike Alice in Wonderland, strange and bewildered, for it is a world in the creation of which she did not partake. … Just as they speak two different languages, so the sexes live in two different worlds linked like the motherland with her colonies by ties strong enough to keep the necessary cooperation between the two independent entities, separated by as yet uncharted seas.*
What has been lacking in our modern culture are myths and rituals to give significance to the woman’s life apart from what she has in relation to a man, be he father or brother or husband. “What rituals can do is to transform necessary unremitting drudgery into something rich, satisfying, and filled with meaning,” Bruce Lincoln tells us in his discussion of women’s initiation in Navajo tribes. A ritual, we have said, is a myth transformed into action. This is observable in Indian tribes; the ritual expresses the myth by action of the body. Myth gives birth to rituals, and rituals give birth to myths. Women’s role in the Navajos’ initiation is the bearer of the young, the one who raises the crops and provides the food that sustains life, and each act is endowed with a myth of significance. “Each time a woman is initiated, the world is saved from chaos, for the fundamental power of creativity is renewed in her being.”† Navajo rituals and myths give women’s tasks meaning and elevate them above boredom, mindlessness, and despair. Among the Navajos this is no opportunistic stratagem to preserve male hegemony, continues Bruce Lincoln. Their myths form a ritual of sacrifice and an apotheosis—an acting out of the meaning and significance of the otherwise routine tasks the woman will do through her life. This kind of ritual demonstrates that the myth for the Navajos is that woman saves the world from chaos.
Liberation, for women and for men, means both are free to be what they inherently are. It means acting and living on the basis of your own being in your social group. Freedom from artificial or cultural handicaps is freedom to develop as your body and your mind and spirit direct. Liberation includes tapping the unconscious powers, what have generally been accorded to feminine capacities such as telepathy and intuition.*
Men withhold liberation from women at the price of becoming slaves themselves. To have a slave makes you yourself participate in slavery; the master enslaves the peon but is enslaved by his own slave. No man can withhold liberation from women without losing it himself, and the same is true for women. But there is no freedom without responsibility. Thus the liberation of women means they also will assume responsibility in proportion to their freedom.
In our contemporary business culture, it is heartening to see that some corporate boards are finding that the feminine approach to problems, involving more empathy and sensitive understanding, can be of special help. Some women in business and politics, such as Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, show that women can achieve success by being as tough as any man. But shall women meet the ills of a male-dominated culture by taking over the least desirable characteristics of men? This is certainly not the answer.
We recall the young woman in Briar Rose, whose dream in her therapy we described in Chapter 11, presenting women’s special telepathy, “which was to demonstrate in the dream,” concluded my patient helpfully, “that the woman was more intelligent and efficient than anyone gave her credit for being.”
John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath shows us a great and profound respect for Ma Joad, the archetypal “earth mother,” who holds the migrant family together. In Steinbeck’s world women have an innate understanding of cyclic immortality, and with motherhood woman comes into her own as a special elemental being. Thus the whiny young girl, Rose of Sharon, joins the ranks of the great Mother in the powe
rful closing passages of The Grapes of Wrath. Left destitute by seasonal rains and perpetual unemployment, the Joad family seeks refuge in an old barn, finding there a boy and another worker near death from starvation. Rose of Sharon has recently lost a baby and her breasts are swollen with milk. She and Ma communicate silently, on some intuitive level:
Suddenly the boy cried, “He’s dying, I tell you! He’s starvin’ to death, I tell you.”…
Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping.
She said “Yes.”
Ma smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed!” She looked down at her hands, tight-locked in her lap.
Rose of Sharon whispered, “Will—will you all—go out?” The rain whisked lightly on the roof.
Ma leaned forward and with her palm she brushed the touseled hair back from her daughter’s forehead, and she kissed her on the forehead. Ma got up quickly. “Come on, you fellas,” she called. “You come out in the tool shed.”
Ruthie opened her mouth to speak. “Hush,” Ma said. “Hush and git.” She herded them through the door, drew the boy with her; and she closed the squeaking door.
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the bam, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.*