Why Read Moby-Dick?

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Melville then turned his attention in the review to Shakespeare. “[I]t is those deep far-away things in him,” Melville declared, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.” Moreover, it was through his “dark characters,” such as Hamlet, Lear, and Iago, that Shakespeare “craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them!” In writing about Hawthorne, Melville, via Shakespeare, was laying the groundwork for Ahab.

  During the fall of 1850, Melville and Hawthorne got to know each other. Temperamentally, the two men could not have been more different. Melville, Sophia Hawthorne wrote, was a “man . . . with life to his finger-tips.” Hawthorne, on the other hand, preferred to keep life at a distance. In fact, Sophia confessed in a letter to her mother that prior to meeting Melville on Monument Mountain, her “shy dear” of a husband had specifically requested not to be introduced to the young and enthusiastic writer. Even in friendship, Hawthorne remained remote and detached while Melville was always crowding in. “Nothing pleases me better,” Sophia wrote of their new literary friend, “than to sit & hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought up against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences.”

  But Melville was not all ardent impetuosity in his conversations with Hawthorne; there was, as Sophia observed, a somewhat unsettling method to his madness. In a letter to her mother, Sophia revealed that the one thing she didn’t like about Melville was his “small eyes.” “Once in a while,” she explained, “his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of those eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.” This is Melville caught in the act of creative infiltration—the sneaky, deceptively “lazy” way that he took what he needed from Hawthorne. Instead of a literary influence, Hawthorne was, for Melville, more of a source of emotional inspiration: the figure that moved him to take Shakespeare’s lead and dive into the darkness. Just as Ahab co-opted the Pequod, Melville used Hawthorne’s fiction only as it served his own literary purposes.

  But what about Hawthorne the man? Where did the power of darkness come from? Melville was at a loss. “Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes . . . ,” Melville wrote in his review, “or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot altogether tell.” “[T]here is something lacking—a good deal lacking,” Melville wrote in February 1851 to Duyckinck, “to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that?—He doesn’t patronise the butcher—he needs roast-beef, done rare.” What Hawthorne needed, more than anything else, was a cannibal friend like Queequeg.

  Late in life, long after Hawthorne’s death at fifty-nine, Melville told his son, Julian, that he believed his father “had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career.” The essential inscrutability of Hawthorne is everywhere in Moby-Dick—in Ahab’s agonizing need to know what is really behind the world’s “pasteboard masks,” in the way the White Whale resonates with fearful and fantastic possibilities and yet ultimately reveals nothing.

  Prior to meeting Hawthorne, Melville had been churning out novels at such a furious rate (he’d penned his most recent two books in a matter of months) that his British publisher advised him to slow down. Under the steadying influence of Hawthorne, Melville paused in the middle of a quite ordinary, picaresque novel about whaling and completely rethought the story in terms of the power of darkness he recognized in Hawthorne’s short stories. Only then did he plunge once again into his whaling material, this time creating the masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.

  Through Ahab, Melville found a way to articulate what he called in his review of Hawthorne “the sane madness of vital truth,” those Tourette’s-like outbursts that no one wants to hear, especially since they happen to be true. If a life amounts only to a senseless death, what is a person to do? Ahab has decided that the best and noblest option available under the circumstances is to attack some substitute for this absurd and ultimately amoral life, such as a white whale, and hurl all his rage and fear and hate at this thing even if he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it will lead not only to his own death but to the deaths of those who follow him.

  One of the reasons Ahab is such a compelling character is that Melville saw much of himself in the captain’s tendency to regard the world symbolically. This is the tendency Melville had to battle throughout his literary career as his metaphysical preoccupations perpetually threatened to overwhelm his unsurpassed ability to find the specific, concrete detail that conveys everything. He also identified with Ahab’s outrageous ambition, for Melville was, he at least hoped, creating a “mighty book.”

  The other breakthrough associated with his invention of Ahab was something he clearly got from Hawthorne: a way to put artistic distance between himself and the very thing he most identified with, thus providing a way to write about the darkest and most frightening aspects of human experience. That was why he could write to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

  Ultimately, however, Melville had difficulty maintaining Hawthorne’s cool remove from the darkness. As Sophia Hawthorne observed, Melville engaged with life; he also engaged with his characters. In December 1850, as he rebuilt his novel on the blasted, ripped-apart foundations of the first draft, he wrote to Duyckinck about the difficulties of transferring what he had in his head onto the page: “And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.” As suggested by this letter, the process of creating Ahab, of channeling what Melville later called “my evil art,” was an all-involving and psychically corrosive experience. If bits of his brain matter were not literally being left upon the manuscript pages of Moby-Dick, something nonetheless was happening to him during those winter and spring months in his study.

  The eyes that so troubled Sophia Hawthorne began to bother Melville to the point that he could barely see the words he was writing on the page. In Pierre, the novel he wrote after Moby-Dick, he provides a fictionalized account of the torment he suffered in his second-story room: “His incessant application told upon his eyes. They became so affected, that some days he wrote with the lids nearly closed, fearful of opening them wide to the light.... Sometimes he blindly wrote with his eyes turned away from the paper.” His eyes so scalded that he could not even see what he was writing, Melville pushed on toward Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale.

  10

  The View from the Masthead

  Ishmael of the Bible was Abraham’s bastard son, who along with his servant mother, Hagar, was banished from his father’s household and forced to wander the desert. Ishmael of Moby-Dick has suffered some grievous unnamed loss and now wanders the waters of the world.

  He is not alone in this. As he mentions in chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” a whaleship in the mid-nineteenth century served as “an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.” As opposed to Ahab’s urgent, soul-singed probing into the meaning of life, Ishmael and his compatriots are more interested in losing themselves in the cosmos. As naive seekers of philosophical truth, their favorite perch is at the masthead on a quiet sunny day in the Pacific.

  “There you stand,” Ishmael says, “a hund
red feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor.”

  But there is a danger in all this seductive oneness. Simply feeling good about life doesn’t mean life is good. “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye,” Ishmael continues, “move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”

  With the appearance of Ahab on the quarterdeck, everything changes. Ishmael becomes one not with the cosmos but with his captain’s monomaniacal quest. Ishmael may have his intellectual pretensions, but they evaporate in the face of Ahab’s overwhelming charisma. “[M]y oath had been welded with [the rest of the crew’s],” Ishmael admits. “A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”

  Ishmael insists, however, that he did not totally succumb to an Ahab view of the world. Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick is based on hatred. “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.” Ishmael, on the other hand, is more afraid than angry, and true to his aesthetically sensitive, essentially Romantic nature; he is most frightened not by the size and strength of Moby Dick but by his distinctive color. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” he says.

  What ensues in chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” is the antithesis of the Nantucket chapter. Instead of rhetorical elation, the point is complete and total depletion. Whiteness evokes, Ishmael insists, “the demonism in the world.” It “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.” It is “a dumb blankness, full of meaning, ... a colorless, all-color of atheism.” Even worse, the whiteness of the whale suggests that the whole visible world, the world of beauty and of love, is a fraud: “[T]he sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.... [P]ondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper.... And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”

  It is with this chapter that Ishmael loses his faith, his nerve, his confidence. He comes down from the inspiring heights of the topmast and, like everyone aboard the Pequod, is drawn irresistibly into Ahab’s angry, iron-grooved way.

  Ishmael’s transformation echoes what was happening to the northern portion of the United States when Melville was working on Moby-Dick. During the fall of 1850 and the winter of 1851, Boston became the epicenter of outrage over the Fugitive Slave Law, and Melville’s father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, was the reluctant focal point. Although Shaw hated slavery, he also loved his country and its laws, which it was his duty to uphold. So it was Shaw who ordered that a slave who’d made his way to Boston be turned over to his Southern captors. Riots and general bedlam erupted, with Shaw being hanged in effigy after the decision. New England gentlemen who had once viewed the South from the safety of their own mastheads had finally been drawn into slavery’s pernicious vortex. What to do?

  Nothing, of course. As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all. “My soul is more than matched,” Starbuck laments, “she’s overmanned; and by a madman!” Just like Starbuck, America’s leaders in the 1850s looked at one another with vacant, deer-in-the-headlights stares as the United States, a great and noble country crippled by a lie, slowly but inevitably sailed toward its cataclysmic encounter with the source of its discontents.

  11

  The Sea

  We Americans love our wilderness: that empty space full of beckoning dreams, the unknown land into which we can disappear, only to return years later, wiser, careworn, and rich. Most of us think of the West as this hinterland of opportunity, but Melville knew that the original wilderness was the “everlasting terra incognita” of the sea. Even today, long after every terrestrial inch of the planet has been surveyed and mapped, only a small portion of the sea’s total volume has been explored by man. Back in 1850, Melville commented that “Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one.”

  Today the American West is a place of cities, suburbs, ghost towns, and national parks. It is civilized. Not so the sea. “[H]owever baby man may brag of his science and skill,” Ishmael ominously intones, “and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” This is not the sea of the “Nantucket” chapter. This is the godless sea of the Essex disaster. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it . . . ,” Ishmael continues; “the masterless ocean overruns the globe . . . the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”

  Given the dangers of the ocean, the wisest thing for a man or woman to do is to steer for the same Polynesian islands that the Essex men so feared and to remain there at all costs. “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!”

  Ishmael’s “insular Tahiti” is the South Seas equivalent of a 1960s-style fallout shelter; both are hideouts from “the horrors of the half known life,” radioactive or wet. The United States in the 1850s must have felt much as it did during the cold war. In both eras, citizens lived with the conviction that a catastrophe was imminent. America dodged the nuclear bullet in the 1960s, but the twenty-first century feels more and more like an era in which a cataclysm, whether financial, environmental, or terrorist devised, is just around the corner. In the end, we are still at the mercy of the sea.

  12

  Is There a Heaven?

  To love and work and be happy in this life is to refrain from focusing on what awaits us and everyone we care about: decay and death, at least in this world. The curse of being human is to realize that it all ends and can do so at any moment. To acknowledge and internalize this truth in an unmediated way is to go, like Ahab, insane.

  Some people don’t think about death very much, if at all. Since there’s nothing they can do about it, why worry about it? Not Melville. Judging from his letters to Hawthorne and his writings throughout his life, he thought about it all the time. The belief that death was the end, that we are utterly and truly annihilated when we die, was not something he could easily accept. He desperately needed to know there is a heaven.

  In the beginning of the book, Ishmael is confident that eternity will be waiting for him no matter what happens down here on Earth. He may be crushed by a whale, but not even God can stave his immortal soul. Even before the Pequod sets sail, however, he has begun to wonder whether this is entirely true. It becomes an obsessive theme of Moby-Dick: Is there a heaven?

  At one point Ishmael j
okingly tells us how he proposes to settle the question once and for all with the help of a whale: “With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces [bundles] of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!”

  Later in the book, in his description of the ship’s carpenter, who is called upon to manufacture Ahab’s new whalebone leg, Melville provides a haunting portrayal of a world bereft of heaven. The carpenter is an existential nullity without a spark of intelligence or human warmth; he merely exists. He personifies a world without God. His “impersonal stolidity . . . seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world,” Ishmael tells us, “involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness . . . ; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next . . . ; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.”

  Ahab is infuriated by his dependence on the carpenter. “Here I am,” he agonizingly soliloquizes, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” He may strive to transcend all that is mundane and bestial, but in the end Ahab is a one-legged old man who requires the help of others.

  So it was for Melville, an author with unquenchable ambition, but who depended on mere mortals to publish and read his books. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay,” he lamented to Hawthorne. “Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.... What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book?” But, of course, more than 150 years after its publication, we are still reading Moby-Dick. Posthumously, Melville achieved the promised land; he is a god in our literary pantheon.