So Ahab was not the first to attribute murderous intention to a whale. Nor was he the first to commit himself to chasing down one particular whale. In May 1839, just before nineteen-year-old Herman Melville sailed for Liverpool, J. R. Reynolds had published in the Knickerbocker Magazine an account of “an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength” that, like the “Ethiopian Albino … was white as wool,” and became the object of a vengeful hunt. Named after the island of Mocha just off the Chilean coast where he was first sighted, Mocha Dick was freakish not only in appearance but also in that he had repeatedly turned to attack his human pursuers. Reynolds’s article was a putatively true relation of the chase, capture, and killing of this hoary white whale, and Melville doubtless had it in mind when he invented the story of Ahab and the white monster that had mutilated him with malicious intent.
In Melville’s version, the name of the whale is slightly changed, and after its pursuer is nearly killed by its counterattack, “for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock” and “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.” Among Ahab’s mutilations is a sexual wound: although his ivory prosthetic leg is “entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy”; and one night ashore—after some mysterious struggle, perhaps with himself in a nightmare, or with some violent stranger—he is found writhing in pain, the “dead bone” having “stake-wise smitten and all but pierced his groin.” As W. H. Auden writes of Ahab’s wound, “the rare ambiguous monster … had maimed his sex,” and Melville was moving toward the insight that when eros is obstructed, it finds outlet as rage. He shows us Ahab—or what is left of him—turning his fury into a fanatic program for striking back at the thing that has unmanned him. The incapacitating wound makes him crave his lost potency all the more, and in this sense he belongs to—indeed, initiates—that lineage of sexually mutilated figures in our literature that includes Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (in The Sun Also Rises) and Faulkner’s Popeye (in Sanctuary), who, lacking the ability to rape a woman using his own body, violates her with a corncob instead.
Ahab, “dismasted,” becomes a monster of calculation. Alone in his cabin, he spreads out before him nautical charts on which he traces Moby Dick’s movements among the reefs and shallows, noting dates and coordinates of previous sightings, planning where and when to engage the foe, like an admiral tracking the enemy fleet. The world becomes a venue for enacting his sweet dream of revenge. Imagining the feel of his blade entering the white whale’s hated flesh, he rocks and moans as if he were reliving the sexual swoon of which he is no longer capable, taking immense pleasure in his immense hate.
In an astonishing chapter entitled “The Grand Armada,” Ahab drives the Pequod into a herd of sperm whales of “so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.” In fact, modern oceanographers have since confirmed that sperm whales do assemble for purposes of mutual defense, and that when the herd is attacked by sharks or other predators, individual whales will expose “themselves to increased attack” by flanking wounded members of the herd and bringing them back into the protective circle. Moby-Dick was, among other things, a poem of lyric praise for this mysterious tenderness in whales—creatures that combine bulk and grace, power and gentleness, and that seem to have an eerie solidarity with one another.‡ Melville wrote about these miraculous creatures with almost devotional awe, likening them, even as he (as Ishmael) hunted them, to sweet-tempered sheep set upon by hunters or wolves. “Beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze,” they give themselves away by their “vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air,” which, for a contemplative moment before the chase begins, seem to the men who would kill them “like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.” In recent years, such passages have been read as precursors to what might be called the literature of environmental sensitivity. There is no “save-the-whales message” in Moby-Dick, as one leading “eco-critic,” Lawrence Buell, concedes; yet Melville repeatedly attributes human qualities to the hunted beasts and bestial qualities to the hunters. And years before advances in whale-killing technology required an affirmative answer, he posed (in chapter 105) the endangered-species question: “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish—Will He Perish?”
In the “Grand Armada” chapter, he wrote about a school of nursing mother whales whose suckling infants “calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast … as if … still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence … looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.” These beautiful creatures are Melville’s equivalents to the unsullied children of Rousseau or Wordsworth. As yet unsevered from their prenatal memories, they exist in this world but are not of it. They have a kind of holiness, as if each mother and nursing baby were a submarine Madonna with Child.
Ahab could not care less. With his mind fixed on the hated white whale, he is, like a later character in Clarel, “Lost in … reminiscence sore / Of private wrong outrageous,” and indifferent to all beauty and benignity. Despite his vast and devastated vanity—“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he tells Starbuck—he knows he needs his men if he is to achieve his murderous aim: “To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order”—and Ahab’s tool is exactly what the crew becomes. They are ideally suited for this role, given that, as Melville makes plain in heavily sexual language, they take orgasmic pleasure in killing whales, as when Ishmael describes how his boat, with “the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents,” approaches the “imminent instant”:
“That’s his hump. There, there, give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall.
On this occasion the coitus is interruptus (“squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped”); but there are many consummated killings, as when Stubb “churned his long sharp lance” into a whale that, “spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole,” dies from the fatal penetration. Stubb will not be denied his postcoital smoke:
“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Tashtego.
“Yes, both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
6.
About a third of the way through Moby-Dick, we come to an extraordinary chapter, “The Quarter-Deck,” in which Melville orchestrates these themes of eros and power into one of the great set pieces in literature about the dynamics of demagoguery. Ahab reveals himself here as the sort of man that Hawthorne described the Reverend Dimmesdale to be in The Scarlet Letter, another powerful orator whose “vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment” capable of swaying his listeners, as a lover does, “to and fro by the mere tone and cadence.” Melville was writing, as the historian Lawrence Levine reminds us, in “an oral world in which the spoken word was central,” where melodrama held the stage, and gifted speakers were public heroes. Whitman reports that as a young man he entertained his fellow passengers aboard the Broadway omnibuses by “declaiming some stormy passage from Julius Caesar,” and as a schoolboy Melville himself had had “vague thoughts of becoming a great orator like Patrick Henry.” It was a time when Americans expected such masters o
f symphonic speaking as Webster and Calhoun to deliver waves of emotion from piano to fortissimo, with plenty of vibrato along the way. As one of Webster’s auditors put it, he seemed a “mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire,” his voice so affecting that his audience thought their “temples would burst with the gush of blood.”
It is hard today to feel the force in such descriptions. To us, there is something ridiculous about the gesticulating man with stentorian voice, pouting and preening and all but weeping (Melville describes Ahab as emitting an “animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose”), whom we know only through crackling old recordings of the likes of William Jennings Bryan, or in the guise of some soapbox lunatic whom we hurry to get past on the street. But in Melville’s time the orator was a democratic hero, and Ahab, deploying what one critic calls his “language of the screamer,” was among the best of them.
He proves it in “The Quarter-Deck.” The chapter begins quietly enough, with Ahab walking one morning on deck as “country gentlemen … take a few turns in the garden” after breakfast. On this particular morning, he has an air of brooding intensity unusual even for him. “ ‘D’ye mark him, Flask?’ whispered Stubb; ‘the chick that’s in him pecks the shell. T’will soon be out.’ ” But not quite yet. For the rest of the day, Ahab goes down and up, to and from his cabin, where he shuts himself up for a while, then re-emerges into the open air, some “bigotry of purpose” ever more evident in his concentrated brow if not yet revealed to his men. Finally, toward evening, he plants his ivory leg in the auger-hole—his “stand-point”—that the carpenter has drilled into the deck at his command and orders Starbuck to send the whole crew aft.
With his men eyeing him warily, he resumes pacing until, bewildered by his behavior, they wonder if they have been “summoned … for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.” Suddenly he barks out, “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?,” and there begins a series of call-and-response exchanges through which the men revert to the condition of children excited by the mounting approval of an adult whose displeasure they fear. “From a score of clubbed voices” comes their answer: “Sing out for him!” And as Ahab grows “fiercely glad and approving,” the men marvel at “how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions”:
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones.… “And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
At last, he gets to the point—to his “stand-point,” that is—in which, swiveling like the Drummond light, he scans his men while producing a bright gold coin that he rubs, very slowly, to high polish on the skirts of his jacket as he hums to himself. He requests a hammer from Starbuck, nails the doubloon to the mast, and, in a clear loud voice, promises the crew that “whosoever of ye raises me … [the] white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
First to take the bait is Stubb’s harpooneer, Tashtego, who wonders aloud if the white whale is “the same that some call Moby Dick”:
“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the Gay-Header deliberately.
“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
“And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—” faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—”
Supplying the elusive word, Ahab becomes co-author of the obstructed sentence:
“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat … aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
At first, his voice is strong, while his accompanists are tentative and halting; but as the music builds, the men come alive to their captain’s fantastic purpose, and crew and captain come together in a crescendo of fused hatred that is the literary equivalent of Wagner’s orgiastic spectacle of Gotterdämmerung.
But there remains one dissident voice. “ ‘Captain Ahab,’ said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder.” Starbuck, unswayed for the moment, is the sort whom Melville will describe in The Confidence-Man as “the moderate man,” whose weakness makes him “the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man.” His prudence holds him back: “ ‘Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?’ ” This is the fulcrum moment on which the chapter turns. Ahab’s initial response is denial: “ ‘Who told thee that?’ cried Ahab; then pausing”—a pause during which he makes the fateful decision not to conceal himself any longer. Baring his inflamed soul, he will plead with his men to make his cause their own and thus sweep away the obstacle that Starbuck has placed in his path:
“Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted.… “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
His flatteries and imprecations have done their work; even Starbuck confesses that “he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me!… Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.” And now Ahab has them all in his grip:
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
Some eighty years before it emerged as the central political fact of the twentieth century, Melville had described in Moby-Dick the reciprocal love between a demagogue and his adoring followers.
But Ahab’s appeal goes to the inquiring mind as well as to the susceptible heart. He speaks to the human need for finding meaning in suffering, to what he calls the “lower layer” of consciousness from which arises the demand to know if the “inscrutable” whale is the agent of “some unknown but still reasoning thing” that has sent it on its mission or if it is a mindless beast driven by purposeless instinct. To Ahab, we are all prisoners of our metaphysical ignorance about the meaning of our suffering, and so he demands of the dubious Starbuck, “how can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” He follows his rhetorical question with an answer that both stirs and appalls:
“To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
This speech is delivered by a man unafraid that meaning itself may prove to be an illusion, yet who is willing to destroy himself and, indeed, his whole world in pursuit of it. As W. H. Auden has remarked, Ahab is “a representation, perhaps the greatest in literature,” of defiant despair—a man willfully beyond comfort because, in the Kierkeg
aardean formulation that Auden aptly invokes, “comfort would be the destruction of him.” In his temperate moments, Ahab understands his own nature: “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.” Yet in his ranting he gives his men ground for believing in their own heroic significance to his campaign to purify the world. In describing Captain Ahab, Melville struck a note that would resound through modern history in ways he could never have anticipated:
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
Writing some thirty years later in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche remarks that “every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering … a ‘guilty’ agent who is susceptible to pain” on whom he can vent his rage and thereby “dull by means of some violent emotion [his] secret, tormenting pain.” In 1928, the French critic Julien Benda, having recognized that Europe was drifting into an age of reactionary nationalism, identified the moving force as xenophobia and accurately predicted that “hatred becomes stronger by becoming more precise.” Here was Melville’s theme; and while there is no evidence that Benda participated even privately in the Melville revival under way in the 1920s, parts of his famous book La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) read like a commentary on “The Quarter-Deck”—as when he describes the rise of national feeling as the formation of a “homogeneous, impassioned group, in which individual ways of feeling disappear and the zeal of each member more and more takes on the color of the others.” But it was not until the 1930s, when the power of demagoguery transformed the world into a charnelhouse, that the prescience of Melville’s creation was fully recognized. Writing after the fascists had seized most of Europe, the leading American literary scholar of his generation, F. O. Matthiessen, saw in Ahab a figure who “provided an ominous glimpse of what was to result when the Emersonian will to virtue became in less innocent natures the will to power and conquest.” To Lewis Mumford, writing during the last months of World War II, Melville was a prophet “as profoundly aware of the existence of radical evil as a contemporary theologian such as Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr. No one in our time who had fathomed his demonic characters … could have attributed the malignancy of fascism to merely economic difficulties that might be appeased by bribes or settled by compromise.”
Melville: His World and Work Page 24