Ishmael and Ahab

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by ALFRED KAZIN

MOBY-DICK is not only a very big book; it is also a peculiarly full and rich one, and from the very opening it conveys a sense of abundance, of high creative power, that exhilarates and enlarges the imagination. This quality is felt immediately in the style, which is remarkably easy, natural and “American,镍 yet always literary, and which swells in power until it takes on some of the roaring and uncontainable rhythms with which Melville audibly describes the sea. The best description of this style is Melville’s own, when he speaks of the “bold and nervous lofty language” that Nantucket whaling captains learn straight from nature. We feel this abundance in heroic types like the Nantucketers themselves, many of whom are significantly named after Old Testament prophets and kings, for these, too, are mighty men, and the mightiest of them all, Captain Ahab, will challenge the order of the creation itself. This is the very heart of the book — so much so that we come to feel that there is some shattering magnitude of theme before Melville as he writes, that as a writer he had been called to an heroic new destiny.

If we start by opening ourselves to this abundance and force, by welcoming not merely the story itself, but the manner in which it speaks to us, we shall recognize in this restlessness, this richness, this persistent atmosphere of magnitude, the essential image on which the book is founded. For MobyDick is not so much a book about Captain Ahab’s quest for the whale as it is an experience of that quest. This is only to say, what we say of any true poem, that we cannot reduce its essential substance to a subject, that we should not intellectualize and summarize it, but that we should recognize that its very force and beauty lie in the way it is conceived and written, in the qualities that flow from its being a unique entity.

In these terms, Moby-Dick seems to be far more of a poem than it is a novel, and since it is a narrative, to be an epic, a long poem on an heroic theme, rather than the kind of realistic fiction that we know today. Of course Melville did not deliberately set out to write a formal epic; but half-consciously, he drew upon many of the traditional characteristics of epic in order to realize the utterly original kind of novel he needed to write in his time — the spaciousness of theme and subject, the martial atmosphere, the association of these homely and savage materials with universal myths, the symbolic wanderings of the hero, the indispensable strength of such a hero in Captain Ahab. Yet beyond all this, what distinguishes Moby-Dick from modern prose fiction is the fact that Melville is not interested in the meanness, the literal truthfulness, the representative slice of life, that we think of as the essence of modem realism. His book has the true poetic emphasis in that the whole story is constantly being meditated and unraveled through a single mind.

“Call me Ishmael,” the book begins. This Ishmael is not only a character in the book; he is also the single voice, or rather the single mind, from whose endlessly turning spool of thought the whole story is unwound. It is Ishmael’s contemplativeness, his dreaming, that articulates the wonder of the seas and the fabulousness of the whale and the terrors of the deep. All that can be meditated and summed up and hinted at, as the reflective essence of the story itself, is given us by Ishmael, who possesses nothing but man’s specifically human gift, which is language. It is Ishmael who tries to sum up the whole creation in a single book and yet keeps at the center of it one American whaling voyage. It is Ishmael’s gift for speculation that explains the terror we come to feel before the whiteness of the whale; Ishmael’s mind that ranges with mad exuberance through a description of all the seas; Ishmael who piles up image after image of “the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood.” It is Ishmael who, in the wonderful chapter on the masthead, embodies for us man as a thinker, whose reveries transcend space and time as he stands watch high above the seas. And of course it is Ishmael, both actually and as the symbol of man, who is the one survivor of the voyage. Yet utterly alone as he is at the end of the book, floating on the Pacific Ocean, he manages, buoyed up on a coflin that magically serves as his life buoy, to give us the impression that life itself can be honestly confronted only in the loneliness of each human heart.

Always it is this emphasis on Ishmael’s personal vision, on the richness and ambiguity of all events as the skeptical, fervent, experience-scarred mind of Ishmael feels and thinks them, that gives us, from the beginning, the new kind of book that Moby-Dick is. It is a book which is neither a saga, though it deals in large natural forces, nor a classical epic, for we feel too strongly the individual who wrote it. It is a book that is at once primitive, falalistic, and merciless, like the very oldest books, and yet peculiarly personal, like so many twentiethcentury novels, in its significant emphasis on the subjective individual consciousness. The book grows out of a single word, “I,” and expands until the soul’s voyage of this “I” comes to include a great many things that are unseen and unsuspected by most of us. And this material is always tied to Ishmael, who is not merely a witness to the story — someone who happens to be on board the Pequod — but the living and germinating mind who grasps the world in the tentacles of his thought.

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THE power behind this “I” is poetical in the sense that everything comes to us through a constant intervention of language instead of being presented flatly. Melville exuberantly sees the world through language — things exist as his words for them — and much of the exceptional beauty of the book lies in the unusual incidence of passages that, in the most surprising contexts, are so piercing in their poetic intensity. But the most remarkable feat of language in the book is Melville’s ability to make us see that man is not a blank slate passively open to events, but a mind that constantly seeks meaning in everything it encounters. In Melville the Protestant habit of moralizing and the transcendental passion for symbolizing all things as examples of “higher laws” combined to make a mind that instinctively brought an inner significance to each episode. Everything in Moby-Dick is saturated in a mental atmosphere. Nothing happens for its own sake in this book, and in the midst of the chase, Ishmael can be seen meditating it, pulling things apart, drawing out its significant point.

But Ishmael is not just an intellectual observer; he is also very much in the story. He suffers; he is there. As his name indicates, he is an estranged and solitary man; his only friend is Queequeg, a despised heathen from the South Seas. Queequeg, a fellow “isolato” in the smug world of white middle-class Christians, is the only man who offers Ishmael friendship; thanks to Queequeg, “no longer my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.” Why does Ishmael feel so alone? There are background reasons, Melville’s own: his father went bankrupt and then died in debt when Melville was still a boy. MelvilleIshmael went to sea — ‟ And at first,” he tells us, “this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land.” But there is a deeper, a more universal reason for Ishmael’s apartness, and it is one that will strangely make him kin to his daemonic captain, Ahab. For the burden of his thought, the essential cause of his estrangement, is that he cannot come to any conclusion about anything. He feels at home with ships and sailors because for him, too, one journey ends only to begin another; “and a second ended, only begins a third and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”

Ishmael is not merely an orphan; he is an exile, searching alone in the wilderness, with a black man for his only friend. He suffers from doubt and uncertainty far more than he does from homelessness. Indeed, this agony of disbelief is his homelessness. For him nothing is ever finally settled and decided; he is man, or as we like to think, modern man, cut off from the certainty that was once his inner world. Ishmael no longer has any sure formal belief. All is in doubt, all is in eternal flux, like the sea. And so condemned, like “all his race from Adam down,” to wander the seas of thought, far from Paradise, be now searches endlessly to put the whole broken story together, to find a meaning, to ascertain — where but in t he ceaselessness of human t bought? — “the hidden cause we seek.” Ishmael does not perform any great actions, as Ahab does; he is the most insignificant member of the fo’c’sle and will get the smallest share of the take. But his inner world of thought is almost unbearably symbolic, for he must think, and think, and think, in order to prove to himself that there is a necessary connection between man and the world. He pictures his dilemma in everything he does on board the ship, but never so clearly as when he is shown looking at the sea, searching a meaning to existence from the inscrutable waters.

What Melville did through Ishmael, then, was to put man’s distinctly modern feeling of “exile,” of abandonment, directly at the center of his stage. For Ishmael there are no satisfactory conclusions to anything; no final philosophy is ever possible. All that man owns in this world, Ishmael would say, is his insatiable mind. This is why the book opens, on a picture of the dreaming contemplativeness of mind itself: men tearing themselves loose from their jobs to stand “like silent sentinels all around the town . . . thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.” All is inconclusive, restless, an endless flow. And Melville’s own style rises to its highest, level not in the neo-Shakespearean speeches of Ahab, which are sometimes bombastic, but in those amazing prose flights on the whiteness of the whale and on the Pacific where Ishmael reproduces, in the rhythms of the prose itself, man’s brooding interrogation of nature.

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BUT Ishmael is a witness not only to his own thoughts, but also a witness to the actions of Captain Ahab. The book is not only a great skin of language stretched to fit the world of man’s philosophic wandering; it is also a world ol moral tyranny and violent action, in which the principal actor is Ahab. With the entry of Ahab a harsh new rhythm enters the book, and from now on two rhythms —one reflective, the other forceful — alternate, to show us the world in which man’s thinking and man’s doing follow each its own law. Ishmael’s thought consciously extends it sell to get behind the world of appearances; he wants to see and to understand everything. Ahab8Ùs drive is to prove, not to discover; the world that tortures Ishmael by its horrid vacancy has tempted Ahab into thinking that he can make it over. He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and to inflict his will on the outside world — whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will. Both are thinkers, the difference being that Ishmael thinks as a bystander, has identified his own state with man’s utter unimportance in nature. Ahab, by contrast, actively seeks the whale in order to assert man’s supremacy over what swims before him as the monomaniac incarnation” of a superior power.

This is Ahab’s quest — and Ahab’s magnificence. For Ahab expresses more forcibly than Ishmael ever could something of the impenitent anger against the universe that all of us can feel. Ahab may be a mad sea captain, a tyrant of the quarter-deck who disturbs the crew’s sleep as he stomps along on his wooden leg. But this Ahab does indeed speak for all men who, as Ishmael confesses in the frightening meditation on the whiteness of the whale, suspect that ‟though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” So man, watching the sea heaving around him, sees it as a mad steed that has lost its rider, and looking at his own image in the water, is tortured by the thought that man himself may be an accident, of no more importance in this vast oceanic emptiness than one of Ahab’s rare tears dropped into the Pacific.

To the degree that we feel this futility in tfie face of a blind impersonal nature that “heeds us not,” and storm madly, like Ahab, against the dread that there’s “naught beyond” — to this extent all men may recognize Ahab’s bitterness, his unrelentingness, his inability to rest in that uncertainly which, Freud has told us, modern man must learn to endure. Ahab figures in a symbolic fable; he is acting out thoughts which we all share. But Ahab, even more, is a hero of thought who is trying, by terrible force, to reassert man’s place in nature. And it is the struggle that Ahab incarnates that makes him so magnificent a voice, thundering in Shakespearean rhetoric, storming at the gates of the inhuman, silent world. Ahab is trying to give man, in one awful, final assertion that his will does mean something, a feeling of relatedness with his world.

Allah’s effort, then, is to reclaim something that man knows he has lost. Significantly, Ahab proves by the flitter struggle he has to wage that man is fighting in an unequal contest; by the end of the book Ahab abandons all his human ties and becomes a complete fanatic. But Melville has no doubt — nor should we! — that Ahab’s quest is humanly understandable. And the quest itself supplies the book with its technical raison d’être. For it leads us through all the seas and around the whole world; it brings us past ships of every nation. Always it is Ahab’s drive that makes up the passion of Moby-Dick, a passion that is revealed in the descriptive chapters on the whale, whale-fighting, whale-burning, on the whole gory and fascinating industrial process aboard ship that reduces the once proud whale to oil-brimming barrels in the hold. And this passion may be defined as a passion of longing, of hope, of striving: a passion that starts from the deepest loneliness that man can know. It is the great cry of man who feels himself exiled from his “birthright, the merry May-day gods of old,” who looks for a new god “to enthrone . . . again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill.” The cry is Ahab’s — “Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”

Behind Ahab’s cry is the fear that man’s covenant with God has been broken, that there is no purpose to our existence. The Pequod is condemned by Ahab to sail up and down the world in search of — a symbol. But this search, mad as it seems to Starbuck the first mate, who is a Christian, nevertheless represents Ahab’s real humanity. For the ancient covenant is never quite broken so long as man still thirsts for it. And because Ahab, as Melville intended him to, represents the aristocracy of intellect in our democracy, because he seeks to transcend the limitations that good conventional men like Starbuck, philistine materialists like Stubb, and unthinking fools like Flask want to impose on everybody else, Ahab speaks for the humanity that belongs to man’s imaginative vision of himself.

Yet with all this, we must not forget that Ahab’s quest takes place, unceasingly, in a very practical world of whaling, as part of the barbaric and yet highly necessary struggle by man to support himself physically in nature. It is this that gives the book its primitive vitality, its burning authenticity. For Moby-Dick, it must be emphasized, is not simply a symbolic fable; nor can it possibly be construed as simply a “sea story.” It is the story of agonizing thought in the midst of brutal action, of thought that questions every action, that annuls it from within, as it. were — but that cannot, in this harsh world, relieve man of the fighting, skinning, burning, the back-breaking row to the whale, the flying harpoons, the rope that can lake you off ‟voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victims.” Moby-Dick is a representation of the passionate mind speaking, for its metaphysical concerns, out of the very midst of life. So, after the first lowering, Queequeg is shown sitting all night in a submerged boat, holding up a lantern like an ‟imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness . . . the sign and symbol of a man without hope, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.” Melville insists that our thinking is not swallowed up by practical concerns, that man constantly searches for a reality equal to his inner life of thought — and it is his ability to show this in the midst of a brutal, dirty whaling voyage that makes Moby-Dick such an astonishing book. What concerns Melville is the heroism of thought itself as it rises above its seeming insignificance and proclaims, in the very teeth of a seemingly hostile and malevolent creation, that man’s voice is heard for something against the watery waste and the deep, that man’s thought has an echo in the universe.

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THIS is the quest. But what makes Moby-Dick so fascinating, and in a sense even uncanny, is that the issue is always in doubt, and remains so to the end. Melville was right when he wrote to Hawthorne: ‟I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb.” And people who want to construe Moby-Dick into a condemnation of mad, bad Ahab will always miss what Melville meant when he wrote of his book: “It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk — but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.” For in the struggle between man’s effort to find meaning in nature, and the indifference of nature itself, which simply eludes him (nature here signifies the whole external show and force of animate life in a world suddenly emptied of God, one where an “intangible malignity” has reigned from the beginning), Melville often portrays the struggle from the side of nature itself. He sees the whale’s view of things far more than he does Ahab’s; and Moby-Dick’s milkwhite head, the tail feathers of the sea birds streaming from his back like pennons, are described with a rapture that is like the adoration of a god. Even in the most terrible scenes of the shark massacre, where the sharks bend around like bows to bite at their own entrails, or in the ceaseless motion of ‟my dear Pacific,” the ‟Potters’ fields of all four continents,” one feels that Melville is transported by the naked reality of things, the great unending flow of the creation itself, where the great shroud of the sea rolls over the doomed ship “as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Indeed, one feels in the end that it is only the necessity to keep one person alive as a witness to the story that saves Ishmael from the general ruin and wreck. In Melville’s final vision of the whole, it is not fair but it is entirely just that the whale should destroy the ship, that man should be caught up on the beast. It is just in a Cosmic sense, not in the sense that the prophet (Father Mapple) predicts the punishment of man’s disobedience in the telling of Jonah’s story from the beginning, where the point made is the classic reprimand of God to man when He speaks out of the whirlwind. What Melville does is to speak for the whirlwind, for the watery waste, for the sharks.

It is this that gives Moby-Dick its awful and crushing power. It is a unique gift. Goethe said that he wanted, as a writer, to know what it is like to be a woman. But Melville sometimes makes you feel that he knows, as a writer, what it is like to be the eyes of the rock, the magnitude of the whale, the scalding sea, the dreams that lie buried in the Pacific. It is all, of course, seen through human eyes — yet there is in Melville a cold, final, ferocious hopelessness, a kind of ecstatic masochism, that delights in punishing man, in heaping coals on his head, in drowning him. You see it in the scene of the whale running through the herd with an open harpoon in his body, cutting down his own; in the sharks eating at their own entrails and voiding from them in the same convulsion; in the terrible picture of Pip the cabin boy jumping out of the boat in fright and left on the Pacific to go crazy; in Queequeg falling into the “honey head” of the whale; in the ropes that suddenly whir up from the spindles and carry you off; in the final awesome picture of the whale butting its head against the Pequod.

In all these scenes there is an ecstasy in horror, the horror of nature in itself, nature “pure,” without God or man: the void. It is symbolized by the whiteness of the whale, the whiteness that is not so much a color as the absence of color. ‟Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?” And it is this picture of existence as one where man has only a peephole on the mystery itself, that constitutes the most remarkable achievement of Melville’s genius. For as in the meditation on the whiteness of the whale, it becomes an uncanny attempt to come to grips with nature as it might be conceived with man entirely left out; or, what amounts to the same thing, with man losing his humanity and being exclusively responsive to primitive and racial memories, to the trackless fathomless nothing that has been from the beginning, to the very essence of a beginning that, in contradiction to all man’s scriptures, had no divine history, no definite locus, but just was — with man slipped into the picture much later.

This view of reality, this ability to side with nature rather than with man, means an ability to love what has no animation, what is inhumanly still, what is not in search, as man himself is — a hero running against time and lighting against “reality.” Here Melville puts, as it were, his ear to reality itself: to the rock rather than to the hero trying to get his sword out of the rock. He does it by constantly, and bitterly, and savagely, in fact, comparing man with the great thing he is trying to understand. Ahab may be a hero by trying to force himself on what is too much for him, but Melville has no doubt that man is puny and presumptuous and easily overwhelmed — in short, drowned — in the great storm of reality he tries to encompass.

This sense of scale lies behind the chapters on the natural history of the whale, and behind the constant impressing on our minds of the contrast between man and the whale. The greatest single metaphor in the book is that of bigness, and even when Melville laughs at himself for trying to hook this Leviathan with a pen, we know that he not merely feels exhilaration at attempting this mighty subject, but that he is also abashed; mighty waters are rolling around him. This compelling sense of magnitude, however, gets him to organize the book brilliantly, in a great flood of chapters which is the homage that he pays to his subject. And it is this sense of a limitless subject that gives the style its peculiarly loping quality, as if it were constantly looking for connectives. But these details tend to heap up in such a staggering array as to combine into the awesomeness of a power against which Ahab’s challenge is utterly vain, and against which his struggle to show his superiority over the ordinary processes of nature becomes blasphemous. The only thing left; to man, Melville seems to tell us, is to take the span of this magnitude — to feel and to record the power of this mighty torrent, this burning fire.

And it is this, this poetic power, rather than any specifically human one, this power of transcription rather than of any alteration of life that will admit human beings into its tremendous scale, that makes up the greatness of the book by giving us the measure of Melville’s own relation to the nature that his hero so futilely attempts to master or defy. For though Melville often takes a grim and almost cruel pleasure in showing man tumbling over before the magnitude of the universe, and though much of the book is concerned, as in the sections on flighting and “cooking” the whale, with man’s effort to get a grip on external nature, first through physical assault and then by scientific and industrial cunning, man finds his final relatedness to nature neither as a hero (Ahab) nor by heeding Father Mapple’s old prophetic warning of man’s proper subservience to God. Though all his attempted gains from nature fail him, and all goes down with the Pequod — all man&$8217;s hopes of profit, of adjustment to orthodoxy (Starbuck), even of the wisdom that is in madness (Pip) — man, though forever alien to the world, an Ishmael, is somehow in tune with it, with its torrential rhythms, by dint of his art, by the directness with which his words grasp the world, by the splendor of his perceptions, by the lantern which he holds up ‟like a candle in the midst of the almighty forlornness.” Man is not merely a waif in the world: he is an ear listening to the sea that almost drowns him; an imagination, a mind, that hears the sea in the shell, and darts behind all appearance to the beginning of things, and runs riot with the frightful force of the sea itself. There, in man’s incredible and unresting mind, is the fantastic gift with which we enter into what is not our own, what is even against us— and for this, so amazingly, we can speak.