Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life—perishing in the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable, except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that labyrinth is the universe.

Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford, and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol, his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.

When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple, who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work, thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his eye.

Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father Mapple’s noble tongue.

“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter for the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord but the Lord his God, and is only patriot to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal: it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself belongs to Heaven and Hell—all its naturalism, all its accurate detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle portion of existence—that which we agree to call civilized—is the realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed glasses.

On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing, and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.

The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard, he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks: the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.”

Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs. Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately, Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety.”

Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never reach the bottom, once land is far astern.