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© I979

MARILYN JUDITH ATLAS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

A PSYCHOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH TO

MOBY-DICK

 

by

Marilyn Judith Atlas

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1979

ABSTRACT

A PSYCHOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH TO
MOBY-DICK

 

BY
Marilyn Judith Atlas

On the surface, Herman Melville seems less compli-
cated than the other dark Romantics. He was neither as
isolated as Edgar Allen Poe, nor as haunted by guilt as
Nathaniel Hawthorne. He, when compared to them, seems
the extrovert, the man who went to sea, the man who decid-
ed to educate himself at twenty-five years of age and who
actually did. He was the pioneer, discovering and culti-
vating a physical world. But if one explores past the
surface, past the sailor, past the man who lived among
the cannibals, one finds parts of him as wild as anything
in Poe, as haunted as anything in Hawthorne. Parts of
Melville cry out into the night; parts feel enveloped in
whale-line.

The Melville I have discovered is a man who be-
lieved in disintegration and who was aware of this belief
even in the midst of this desperate personal need for
lasting absolutes. He allowed his reader, one might even

say that Melville's style demanded that his reader, enter

Marilyn Judith Atlas

his struggle, personalize it, making the struggle his own.
He was a man who created linearly and yet believed the
world was too complex for organization; a man preoccupied
with the truth and yet one who knew in his blood that all
earthly truths were at best partial, paltry. The best he
hoped for was to end where he began . . .and to perhapsluumn
the place for the first time.

In this dissertation I have attempted to go beyond
the Melville who protected himself with aloofness and
false bravado and to find, briefly, the man who believed
in diving and who therefore dived and like the Catskill
eagle miraculously soared again. This dissertation is a
study of the major personal relationships in Herman
Melville's life and an exploration of how they translated

themselves into the metaphors and characters of Moby-Dick.

 

It contains three major sections.
In the first, I explore the major relationships
in Melville's life, up until and including those he was

involved in when creating Moby-Dick. I demonstrate the

 

existence of Melville's fear of emotional vulnerability
and how, when Melville's desire to have a fully-recipro-
cal relationship finally surpassed his fear of it, his

inability to trust doomed the relationship: Melville's
absolute need to be accepted by the person he chose for
this role, Nathaniel Hawthorne, blinded him to the part

of Hawthorne that was a frightened, detached man.

Marilyn Judith Atlas

In the second section I demonstrate how Melville
avoided this strain of absolutism when creating the

imagery of Moby-Dick. I focus my attention on Melville's

 

complex use of the line and circle. In developing both
of these patterns, Melville allows them healing and de-
structive qualities. He also allows them to melt into
one another: the line becomes the circle, the snake
turning on its own tail, and the circle divides to once
again become the line, always maintaining its ability to
reconnect.

In the third section of my study I demonstrate
that Melville also avoided this tendency toward reduc-

tionism in creating the characters of Moby-Dick. Ahab,

 

Starbuck,and Ishmael all share a strong need for control,
but Melville allows none of their solutions to function
successfully. Ahab's life ends in self-destruction, as
does Starbuck's; neither activity nor passivity consist—
ently maintains life. Ishmael is saved, not by the wisdom
of rejecting Ahab's vision of the world, but by serendi-
pity. He has no more direct control than do the other
members of the Peguod.

My dissertation demonstrates that while Melville
failed to control his need for absolute solutions in his
personal life, he avoided this need in his creation of

Moby-Dick, successfully writing a novel that explored

 

rather than reduced his need for order.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I especially wish to thank Professor C. David
Mead, the chairman of my dissertation committee. It was
in his seminar on American Romantic Literature where I

first discovered that by studying Moby-Dick I could find

 

magical pieces of Herman Melville . . . and myself.
During the last four years he has generously given me
time, emotional and intellectual support. Professor Mead
has been a true mentor to me, one that I will proudly
emulate during my own career.

I would also like to thank Professors James
Pickering and Russel Nye for serving on my committee and
helping me to discover and study my own questions. Both
men have consistently reinforced originality and scholar-
ship; both men have been willing to listen. I also
acknowledge my indebtedness to the numerous scholars,
critics and biographers who have studied Herman Melville

and Moby-Dick before me, especially Jay Leyda, Merrell R.

 

Davis, William H. Gilman, F. O. Matthiessen, Charles
Olson, Howard P. Vincent, Robert Zoellner and Edwin
Haviland Miller, and to the philosophers who have helped
me to perceive the power of patterns, among them Georges

Poulet, Gaston Bachelard, and Katharine Kuh.

iii

There are many others to thank. Randall Scott and
Jane Arnold made Michigan State University Library a
human place to research. Professors Emily Watts, Herbert
Marder, Donald Smalley, Cary Nelson, and Lynn Altenbernd
of the University of Illinois, helped form my mind and
increase my knowledge of the world of art, history, and
literature. Professors Barry Gross, Linda Wagner, Bernard
Paris and Bob Weil of Michigan State University helped
continue the process, sharing with me what they knew, what
they were, what they could. My father, Aron, taught me to
believe that learning was an honor and a joy. My mother,
Malka, taught me to believe in the inexhaustible power of
the human will. My sisters, Syma Atlas Jelen and Renee
Atlas, and my friends Barbara Brody Worthington, Sara
Wolensky Kovar, Mary Castiglie Anderson, Melody McCollum
Zajdel, Sara Culver Elgammal, Lynn Wasserman Scott, and

Elda Austin generously listened to my bad Moby-Dick jokes

 

and to my ideas and fears. Blaine McKinley bravely

entered my life during the last months of my dissertation
and when I was convinced that the Grand Armada had for-
ever melted into shadow, he helped me once again touch its
kaleidoscopic magic. Professor Henry Silverman, Chairman
of the American Thought and Language Department at
Michigan State University, hired me. The English Depart-
ment at Michigan State University financially and emotion-
ally supported me. Zachary Gass, simply, consistently,

uniquely, loved me through it all.

iv

Without these people, and countless others, I
might not have been rich enough, brave enough, to create

even this. I thank them from my heart and from my head.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Section Page

I. Herman Melville's Relationships:
1819-1851. 0 O O O O O O O O I O O O O O O 1

II. The Line and Circle in Moby-Dick: A
Study of Fluid Imagery . . . . . . . . . . 51

 

III. Ahab, Starbuck, and Ishmael: The
Individual's Search for Order. . . . . . . 103

IV. Conclusion: Melville's Creative
Resistance of Absolutes. . . . . . . . . . 137

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

vi

SECTION I

HERMAN MELVILLE'S RELATIONSHIPS: 1819-1851

Edwin Haviland Miller, Herman Melville's latest
and most psychologically astute biographer, sees
Melville's difficulty with relationships as a central
problem in his life. He theorizes that the relationship
Melville developed in 1850 with Nathaniel Hawthorne
served as a culminating link in a series of relationships
which he traces back to Melville's early life. Miller
focuses on Melville's continual search for the ideal
father:

Without any awareness on his part, he was the

culminating link in a series of events and rela-

tionships which can be traced almost to the

beginning of Melville's life. That Hawthorne

was in Melville's eyes an ideal father was the

most significant link. . . .I
Although the general direction of Miller's statement is
correct, that Hawthorne was a culminating link in a series
of relationships which can be traced to Melville's early
life, Melville, in his relationship with Hawthorne, was
attempting to break the pattern of inequality in his
relationships: he did not need Hawthorne to parent him,

but to confirm him as only an equal can. Melville was

already receiving the parenting he missed in childhood

1

2
from his wife, Elizabeth Knapp. and his friend, the

editor of New York's Literary World, Evert Duyckinck.

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a culminating link because it was
with him that Melville attempted to form a relationship
of equals, one where he and Hawthorne would be two of
those few men who formed "A chain of God's posts around
the world."2 Neither his wife nor Duyckinck were included-
in this category. They were not perceived by Melville as
his spiritual equals.

It was in the midst of this relationship with

Hawthorne that Moby-Dick was created. This novel was

 

started before Melville met Hawthorne, but according to
Howard Vincent's scholarly research, this version lacked
the intricate characterization and philosophical detail
of the later'version.3 Melville's great risk, an attempt
to form a reciprocal, open relationship between equals,
personally failed, but Melville successfully projected
his new found bravery into the philosophy and humanity of

Moby-Dick.

 

By the time Melville met Hawthorne, he was too
emotionally bruised to develop an open, reciprocal
relationship. Martin Buber, twentieth century religious
philosopher, discusses the importance of those relation-
ships we form in early life: "The loves of childhood and
of adolescence cannot be subtracted frOm us; they have

become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be

3
severed. It is as if they had entered our blood stream."4
The early relationships which entered Melville's blood
were slightly poisoned. His parents undermined his in-
telligence, attractiveness, and general sense of self-
worth. Ronald Laing, British psychologist, discusses the
various ways individuals can reject segments of each
other:

There are different levels of confirmation or

disconfirmation. An action may be confirmed at

one level and disconfirmed at another. Some

forms of 'rejection' imply limited recognition

-—the perception of and responsiveness to what

is rejected. . . . Direct 'rejection' is not

tangential; it is not mocking or in other ways

invalidating. It need neither depreciate nor

exaggerate the original action. It is not

synonomous with indifference or imperviousness.

Some areas of a person's being may cry out

for confirmation more than others. Some forms

of disconfirmation may be more destructive of

self-development than others.5
Herman Melville, born in New York City, August 1, 1819,
the second son and third child of Allan Melvill and
Maria Gansevoort, was not confirmed by either parent:
they fostered feelings in Melville of mediocrity and
unattractiveness, negatively affecting Melville's attitude
toward himself and setting up a relationship based on
competition between him and their favored eldest son,
Gansevoort.

Allan, himself an insecure importer of fabrics,

gloves, stockings, and perfumes who was to die an exhausted

and bankrupt death in 1832 when Melville was just twelve,

gave Melville either negative criticism or back—handed

4

compliments. Generally his message was that Melville was
neither energetic nor intelligent. When Melville was
seven, Allan wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, Peter
Gansevoort, revealing his belief that Melville was in-
nately dull: Melville was very "backward in speech &
somewhat slow in comprehension."6 Three years later Allan
wrote another letter, this time to his father, revealing
his belief that Melville was making progress, and although
amiable was neither quick nor energetic:

Herman I think is making more progress than

formerly, & without being a bright Scholar, he

maintains a respectable standing, & would proceed

farther, if he could be induced to study more --

being a most amiable & innocent child, I cannot

find it in my heart to coerce him, especially as

he seems to have chosen Commerce as a favourite

pursuit. . . .7
Allan found his eldest son, Gansevoort, much superior to
Melville and Melville, accepting his inferior position,
became "docile." If he could not get the confirmation he
needed, he would repress needing it. Docility was less
straining than protest. Edwin Miller sees Melville's
passivity as evidence that he felt unable to successfully
compete with his brother: "No son aspires to such a
passive state or to such epithets unless there is no

other avenue open to him."8

Most likely, Melville did
not overtly analyze the motivation behind his passivity,
but his later attitude toward himself reveals feelings of

inadequacy. His desire for knowledge, for understanding,

5

and for a respectable position in New York intellectual
circles, may have been kindled by an unconscious need to
prove that his dead father's judgment was incorrect.

Because Allan confused his message of Melville's
intellectual dullness with positive responses about his
amiable nature, it was even more difficult for Melville
to protest his treatment. His relationship with Allan
was further complicated when Allan's business began
failing. In the late twenties, Melville's father had in-
vested several thousand dollars, the bulk of his capital,
in a business venture, a transaction which ruined him
financially. Lawsuits were filed against him, causing
him to leave Broadway and escape to his wife's family in
Albany, New York; Allan was emotionally desperate. He
wrote an anxious letter to his father attempting to borrow
five hundred dollars. In January, 1832, he broke under
the strain of this crisis. His brother, Thomas Melvill,
Jr., went to see him in Albany, negatively assessing his
condition in a letter he wrote to Allan's friend, Lemuel

Shaw: "I found him very sick. . .under great mental

 

excitement -- at times fierce, even maniacal."9 Thomas
Melvill, Jr.'s perception, that Allan was in a dangerous
condition, proved true; January 28, 1832, Allan died with-
out ever recovering his composure.

Allan's hysterical death added still another

negative element to Melville's sense of his own worthiness.

6

Not only was Melville a slow person who could be at best
friendly, but also one who could become mentally deranged.
If his father could die mad, then he, being weaker and
less intelligent, could certainly lose control of his
mind. In 1849, this fear of madness was still a strong
element in Melville's personality when one of his ac-
quaintances, Charles Fenno Hoffman, a member of the New
York literati, became mad. Melville wrote a letter to
his friend, Evert Duyckinck, admitting feelings of empathy
and fear:

This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes

straight home to every man who feels his soul in

him, -- which but few men do. For in all of us

lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And

he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness

is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort of

sensation permanent madness is may be very well

imagined. . . .10

In Moby-Dick, Melville also conveys his sensitivity toward

 

madness, this time through Ishmael, the novel's narrator.
Ishmael recounts a childhood dream of uncontrol:

. . .nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to
be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed
in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and
the nameless, unimaginable silent form or phantom,
to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated
by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on
ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful
fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever
thinking that if I could but stir it one single
inch, the horrid spell would be broken.11

Melville's identification with his father's madness made
his relationship to him even more complicated. He, at

least unconsciously, must have resented his father's low

7
Opinion of his intellect, and now Allan had proven that
even his own intellect was precarious.

Melville's problematic relationship with Allan
may very well have been a major cause in his fear of
emotional vulnerability. While the destructive quality
of this relationship is well documented in Edwin Miller's
biography, an earlier biographer, Newton Arvin, ignores
its complexity. Arvin sees their relationship as gener-
ally positive. When Arvin writes, "when Melville has
Redburn say, 'I always thought him a marvelous being,
infinitely purer and greater than I was,‘ he may be
speaking not only for Wellingborough Redburn and his
father but for himself and Allan Melvill."12 Arvin is
overlooking the feeling of worthlessness and fear that
identification with Allan must have elicited in Melville,
especially after his father's financial failure and mental
breakdown.

If Melville idealized his father, he also feared
and resented him. These confused feelings displaced them-
selves into his other relationships. From 1844—1850,
when he was living with his wife and attempting to make
contact with New York literary circles, Melville was torn
by his attitude toward his associates. He did not know
whether to feel inferior or superior to them. While Perry
Miller blames Melville's intellectual isolation on the fact

that his peers were conservative and basically non-

8
intellectual, the fact that Melville wanted to be accepted
by individuals who felt less passionately about ideas than
he, reveals Melville's confused attitude toward relation—
ships and his own worth.13
Melville's mother, Maria, increased Melville's

feelings of worthlessness. She also preferred Gansevoort
to Melville. In 1870,Melville wrote a poorly disguised
portrait of his mother which reflected long harbored
bitterness toward her and anger at his secondary role in
the family's structure:

When boys they were I helped the bent;

I made the junior feel his place,

Subserve the senior, love him, too;

. . .But me the meek one never can serve,

Not he, he lacks the quality keen

To make the mother through the son

An envied dame of power, a social queen.
Melville's anger at his mother is again verified by the
fact that in his old age, he remarked to his niece, Anne

Morewood, that his mother hated him,15

strengthening the
connection between the narrator of this poem and his
mother.

Melville's mother fostered feelings of unattrac-
tiveness in her son, an attitude that in adulthood made
him believe himself unworthy of love. In his relation-

ship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, after Melville had completed

Moby-Dick, he wrote Hawthorne a letter revealing his self-

 

hatred: "You were archangel enough to despise the im-

perfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the

ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth.. .."16

Yet even in the midst of self-disgust there is pride; in

his ugliness he identifies himself with Socrates.
Melville's relationship to his parents, under-

standably, made him sensitive and self-protective. At

fifteen, he published a short-short story in the New York

 

Sun revealing his acceptance of an ironic universe, and
exploring his detached, accepting facade. The story's
setting is filled with images of death and emptiness:
frost-nipt fruit and naked hazel bushes. Autumn is
portrayed indifferent toward the death which surrounds it:

. . .Had it been Winter he would have raved, had

it been Spring she would have wept, had it been

Summer she would have fainted. Autumn never

cares, he turns up the lane with his hands still

beneath his empty pockets, humming a tune and

looking pleasant as ever.
Melville's self-protection is also revealed in his relation—
ship with his eldest brother, Gansevoort. If Melville was
"dear" and "beloved," his parents never hesitated to com-
pare him unfavorably with their eldest son: Allan found
Gansevoort "buoyant and gifted," and Maria found him
"beautiful."18

Although the relationship between Melville and

Gansevoort was overtly peaceful, there were undercurrents
of coldness. Gansevoort was fifteen years old when his

father died and he accepted the role of family provider.

During the years when Gansevoort was attempting to run

10
his father's hat and fur business, Melville was clerking
in the New York State Bank directed by his Uncle Peter.
In 1834 he helped Gansevoort with the business for a short
time. He left the business to farm with his Uncle Thomas
at Pittsfield and later that year, 1837, taught school near
the farm.

On April 15, 1837, Gansevoort's business went
bankrupt, and he returned home depressed and ill. Melville
also returned home to his mother and studied surveying
for a short while. In 1839 he decided to become a sailor
on a merchant ship. We have no information concerning
Gansevoort's response to Melville's decision, but we do
know that when Melville returned his brother, whose out-
ward strength was recovered, helped him to reestablish
his land-life in New York City. Gansevoort wrote a
sarcastic letter to his younger brother, Allan, revealing
a hesitant unwillingness to be used by Herman and his
companion, Eli Murdoch, as provider:

Herman is still here -- He has been & is a
source of great anxiety to me -- He has not
obtd a situation -- Fly is still on the lookout
. . . . They are both in good health & toler-
able spirits. . . . They dine with me every
day at Sweeney's & are blessed with good
appetites -- as my exchequer can vouch --
Herman has had his hair sheared. . .and looks
more like a Christian than usual--19
At the time Gansevoort wrote this letter, 1840, he was a

lawyer and spokesman for the Democratic party, once again

in Maria's eyes, the successful son. His reputation as

11

orator was strong. Gansevoort was frequently praised by
the press as having elicited a powerful emotional response
from his audience.

In 1840, he may have appeared powerful to the
world of politics and journalism, but in his private,
psychological world, he was travelling on mutable ground.
After the failure of the hat and fur business, he had
never fully recovered his confidence. His health had
collapsed in 1837 and constant worry and overwork were
diminishing this endurance again.

In 1844 Gansevoort's career was at its height.

An article published in the Niagara Democrat praised him

 

for his magnetism:

. . .he held the attention of his audience for
two hours and a half, while he discussed the
Texas Question. . .embellishing his discourse
with all the graces of oratory, the keenest wit,
and passing alternately 'from grave to gay, from
lively to severe.‘

He was hoping that James K. Polk would find him a public
position. When Polk failed to do so, Gansevoort wrote
him a note that carefully withheld anger, anger that
Gansevoort would displace toward himself:

Although the entire failure of my application

(for public employment) has injured me more

seriously than you can imagine both in the

present and the future and has fallen upon me

with stunning force,. . .I acquiesce in the

result without a murmur.20

Gansevoort's need to verbalize acquiescence is linked to

a need to maintain control. He was not meeting his dead

12

father's or doting mother's concept of him. If he was
not the ideal son his parents thought him, for he had no
sense of himself to grasp: he had never built an identity
for himself separate from his parents' attitude toward him.
Allen Wheelis, twentieth century psychologist, discusses
the portrayal of composure at a time when a person is
justifiably disappointed:

What appears to be strength and autonomy of

superego may in fact be the superego's last-

ditch effort to preserve itself against change.

A superego is never more authoritarian than

when its authority is about to be lost.21

Gansevoort attempted to be the brave, successful
son. His active roles stemmed from a need to avoid
failure rather than a need for success. He was driven by
his parentS' concept of him to be independent, vital, and
successful, but his facade was growing increasingly brittle.
On May 12, 1846, when only thirty years old, after a brief
service as secretary of legation in the Court of St. James,
Gansevoort died. His last letter to Melville portrays deep
exhaustion and overpowering depression.
The letter begins in a formal fashion, revealing

his need to patronize and to be useful:

Herewith you have a copy of the arrangement with

Wiley & Putnam for the publication in the 0.5. of

your work on the Marquesas. . .By the steamer of

tomorrow II sent to yr address several nggspapers

containing critiques on your work. . . .

It soon, however, reverted to more personal feelings:

13
My thoughts are so much at home that much of
my time is spent in disquieting apprehensions
as to matters & things there. . .I sometimes
fear I am gradually breaking up. . . .Selfishly

speaking I never valued life much -- it is
impossible to value it less than I do now. . . .

23
In this letter Gansevoort revealed his compulsion to
apologize for feelings of depression. He continued his
letter by admitting that he wanted passionately to avoid
failure (debt), and had no interest in the rewards of
success. He was much distressed because he feared that
he could no longer be the provider: his feelings of in-
adequacy would not let him rest.

We know very little about Melville's response to
his brother. We do know, however, that indirectly there
must have been a great deal of competition, on Melville's
side, at least. Undercurrents of Melville's competitive-
ness with Gansevoort exist, for instance, in Melville's
attitude toward oratory.

Gansevoort was the chosen family orator. As early
as 1826 Allan commented on Melville's poor speaking
ability. It was not until 1837, when Melville was
eighteen years old, that he became involved in a debating
club, the Philo Logos, thus rivalling Gansevoort on
Gansevoort's territory. Up until then, Melville had
consistently avoided any infringement in the area of
public speaking. It is important to note that in 1837

Gansevoort declared bankruptcy, fell ill and generally

proved himself vulnerable. Biographers have neglected to

14

note this revealing coincidence: only after Gansevoort's
failure could Melville even begin competing with his
brother. Even in 1837, Melville's involvement in the
club was more political than speech-oriented. He was
still protecting himself from overtly competing with
Gansevoort.24

This participation in Philo Logos was Melville's
major experience with public speaking until after
Gansevoort's death. In 1857-58, and 1859-60, Melville
took part in two lecture series. Neither, as documented
by Merton M. Sealts, Jr., were successful. David Mead in
his well-wrought study of the nineteenth century Ohio
lyceum, also notes Melville's poor ability as public
speaker. Mead concludes that Melville's Ohio lectures
were failures because they were too low-keyed for his Ohio

25 Melville never became an excellent orator;

audience.
he never successfully competed with his brother on his
brother's ground.

Melville replied to Gansevoort's last letter, but
it arrived after his brother's death. While Melville's
response was supportive, it was perhaps too calm. A
subsequent letter, written to his uncle, Peter Gansevoort,
was mechanical and dealt with funeral finances rather than
the emotional pain that might come at losing one's brother.

Feelings of competition and jealousy may help to

explain why Melville's response to Gansevoort's death was

15
not warmer. While Gansevoort was useful in helping
Melville financially and in being his literary agent in
London, their relationship was never emotionally close.
The death of Gansevoort brought no major change to
Melville's life because he had not lost someone emotion-
ally close to him; he had only lost a sometimes useful,
but more often psychologically inhibiting competitor who
had been praised by his parents as the more brilliant

and verbally adept.

In 1844 Melville's own career as writer was just
beginning. But for many years Melville was to write in
emotional isolation. From 1844-1850 none of Melville's
relationships were to be intimate.

Newton Arvin saw Melville as a man with a great
capacity for friendship. When he interpreted Melville's
American navy experience, he saw it as one involving the
formation of intimate relationships:

. . .his capacity for friendship, along with his
need of it, was very great, and among his comrades
of the maintop he struck up several intimacies;
with a lean saturnine, bookish man whom he calls
Nord; with a nautical poet he calls Lemsford;

with Griffith Williams, a good-humored Yankee

from Maine; and above all with 'matchless and
unmatchable Jack Chase,’ his idolized captain of
the maintop.26

What Arvin saw as intimacy on board the United States was

 

idealization. We have no evidence in any of these

16

relationships that Melville attempted to share his real
self and learn about a fully complicated, and therefore,
imperfect, other. If Melville's need for friendship in
1842 was strong, his capacity for anything other than
partial, idealized relationships was very small. His
early relationships with Allan, Maria, Gansevoort,and,as
far as we know,with any of his other six siblings, had
allowed him no experience for open, reciprocal relation-
ships. On the contrary, they had taught him not to trust
and perhaps even more importantly, not to feel too deeply
about any one person. Melville had made himself as
emotionally invulnerable as possible. He preferred to
treat people as if they were somehow unable to comprehend
his full complexity. Regardless, he was unwilling to show
it.

Unlike Arvin, Perry Miller senses Melville's iso-
lation. Miller notes that the type of questions Melville
asked separated him even from the intellectual circles of
his era:

. . .on his own he acquired a passion for ideas,

and then tried to enter a world where taste was

respected, wit admired, erudition praised, but

ideas themselves -- well, those might turn out

to be 'german' and 'transcendental.‘ If so, they

were to be ridiculed and, wherever possible,

stamped out.27
In 1844, when Melville was launching his writing career in
New York, its two main editors, Evert Duyckinck and Lewis

Gaylord Clark,were embroiled in power struggles.28

17

Generally, New York was growing increasingly unwilling to
risk change. Lewis Mumford attempts to explain New York's
growing conservativism during this era:

The pioneer phase was strenuous, hazardous,

heroic; but once the settlement was effected,

once the town was founded and the building-

lots divided and the outlaws rounded up, it

was unbearably tame. . . .In provincial society

we are nearer to Europe, that is, nearer to a

settled life, to order, authority, tradition.29
Melville preferred isolation to risk; it felt safer. He
needed to legitimize his own ability, an ability his
parents had undermined, by gaining acceptance into New
York intellectual life. Melville wanted to belong, or to
at least try to belong, to Evert Duyckinck's New York
intellectual circle, the most scholarly in New York, one
containing the old Dutch Episcopalian element of the town.30
Abraham Maslow, humanistic psychologist, discusses the
human tendency to get safety needs met before spiritual
ones:

Assured safety permits higher needs and impulses

to emerge and to grow towards mastery. To

endanger safety, means regression backward to

the more basic foundation. What this means is

that in the choice between giving up safety

and giving up growth, safety will ordinarily

win out. Safety needs are prepotent over growth

needs.31
Although Melville remained on the periphery of the Duyckinck
circle, Duyckinck himself became a long-term friend. He
was kind to Melville and an important intellectual figure

in New York: in 1847 Evert Duyckinck was editor and owner

of Osgood's Literary World, one of the most important

 

18

32 Previously he had been

literary weeklies of its time.
literary advisor to the Wiley and Putnam publishing house.
He was also the owner of one of the best libraries in New
York.33
Regardless of Duyckinck's important positions, he
was not Melville's intellectual equal; certainly, he was
not a believer in suffering over spiritual and intellec-
tual truths. But he knew most of the famous literary
figures of his era, readily introduced Melville to whom-
ever he could, willingly lent him books, helped arrange

for the American publication of Typee and placed favorable

reviews of the work in Literary World. Not sharing or

 

understanding Melville's need for intellectual comraderie,
he patronized what he considered Melville's odd intellec-
tual eccentricities. Duyckinck wrote in a letter to his
brother George, a statement about Melville's reading
which revealed this patronizing stance:

By the way Melville reads old Books. He has

borrowed Sir Thomas Browne of me and says finely

of the speculations of the Religio Medici that

Browne is a kind of 'crack'd Archangel.‘ Was

ever any thing of this sort said before by a

sailor?34
Although Duyckinck was himself an avid reader, his sincere
interest in Browne's simultaneously alogical and argumen-
tative treatise is questionable. But Duyckinck did write

Melville reviews which reveal warmth towards the man, if

not philosophical understanding of his work.

l9

Melville did not find a fully reciprocal relation-
ship with an equal in Duyckinck, but he did find a
nurturing and loyal friend, one who provided him with the
main—stream intellectual support he so needed. Melville
was also useful to Duyckinck who was afraid of losing his
connection with young, expansive intellectuals. In 1847,
Evert, fearful that he would have little part in helping
New York find its own great writers, wrote to his brother

35 Melville

stating that he felt useless and unwanted.
provided him with the focus he needed.

Their relationship lasted Duyckinck's lifetime.
Brief blotter memoranda kept during the last two years of
Duyckinck's life record regular visits from Melville.36
It was Duyckinck and not Hawthorne who was to fulfill
Melville's need for a father, one who could nurture and
praise him, though not one that could understand his deep
spiritual need for order, and the strength to find that
order.

Melville freely used his relationship with
Duyckinck as a protective yet,emotional buffer zone. He
felt comfortable venting his feelings of isolation to
Duyckinck. On April,1849, after his philosophical novel,
Maggi, received a negative reception, it was to Duyckinck
that he turned for comfort. He wrote to Duyckinck, knowing

that even if he did not fully understand, or agree, he

would offer solace. With Duyckinck he could risk sounding

20

bitter: "Who in the name of the trunkmakers would think
of reading Old Burton were his book published for the

first to day?"37

It was Duyckinck who he could trust not
to reject him.

During this same period, in 1847, Melville married,
again working toward his need for security rather than
emotional fulfillment that can only come from a relation-
ship between equals. Melville, then twenty-eight, married
the daughter of Judge Shaw, a friend of his father's.
Elizabeth, a close friend of his sister, Helen Maria, had
most likely also been a friend of his since childhood.
Newton Arvin correctly calls the marriage "cousinly."38

In his marriage Melville opted for nothing new;
he chose a spouse who would offer him physical nurturing
without spiritual communication. Regardless of the deep
emotional tension in his family, they had always supplied
his physical needs. Elizabeth would offer similar caring.

Marriage brought little change to Melville's life.
It was highly patterned, and most likely spiritually un-
fulfilling. Elizabeth did not understand what her husband
wrote. She revealed this in a letter to her step-mother:

I suppose by this time you are deep in the 'fogs'
of Maggi -- if the mist ever does clear away, I
should like to know what it reveals to you --
there seems to be much diversity of opinion about
Mardi as might be supposed. . . .When you hear
Efiy—Individual express an opinion with regard to
it, I wish you would tell me -- whenever it is --

good or bad -- without fear of offence -- merely
by way of curiosity.39

21
Domestically, their existence was extremely ordered. It
allowed Melville the time he needed to create, but it did
not offer him understanding. Again Elizabeth reveals in
a letter to her step-mother information about her routine
with Melville:

Perhaps you will wonder what on earth I have to
occupy me. Well in fact, I hardly know exactly
myself. . . .We breakfast at 8 o'clock, then
Herman goes to walk and I fly up to put his room
to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk
immediately on his return. Then I bid him good-
bye with many charges to be an industrious boy
and not upset the inkstand, and then flourish
the duster. . . .40

Even during their honeymoon, Elizabeth's conservative
needs seemed to color her responses. She found the house
at which they stayed uncomfortably complicated and
communicated her feeling of discomfort to her step-mother
via letter:

The House at which we are staying, the best one

in the place, is a great rambling, scrambling

old castle of a thing, all stairs and entries

and full of tawdry decorations. A forbidding

strangeness pervades the place and makes me 41
want to get out of it as soon as possible. . . .

 

Again on her return from Lansingburgh, familiarity became
an issue:

. . .I had never been in a canal boat in my
life, Herman thought we had better try it for
novelty. . . .while I was suffocating with the
heat and bad atmosphere, he was on deck, chilled
and half-frozen with the fog and penetrating
dampness. . . .

A year after their marriage Elizabeth's letters

began to reveal increased dissatisfaction, but she did

22

not let these feelings of unfulfillment translate them-
selves into emotional separation from Melville: she felt
obligated to meet his need for physical comfort and psycho-
logical dependence. On June 6, 1848, almost a year after
their marriage, when Melville was near completion of
Mardi, Elizabeth expressed these attitudes in another
letter to her step-mother:

And now for something which I hardly know whether

to write you or not I feel so undecided about it.

My cold is very had indeed, perhaps worse than it

has ever been so early, and I attribute it

entirely to the warm dry atmosphere. . .and Herman

thinks I had better go back to Boston with Sam

. . . .But I don't know as I can make up my mind

to go and leave him here -- and besides I'm afraid

to trust him to finish up the book without me!

That is -- taking all things into consideration

I'm afraid I should not feel at ease enough to

enjoy my visit without him with me.43
Elizabeth met Herman's dependence with patronization, and
her own dependence.

Although their relationship was not close, it
fulfilled both of their needs for firm, conservative
limits and for domestic regimentation. Newton Arvin saw
the distance in Melville's relationship to Elizabeth as
the product of latent homosexual tendencies. He ignored
the intellectual separation between Elizabeth and Herman,
and apologized for Melville's marital choice for social
rather than psychological reasons:

He could not, for one thing, given all his
connections, abandon himself genially to the
declassed and rather raffish Bohemianism that

Whitman found so congenial. Marriage was
doubtless inescapable for him. . . .44

23
It is essential to note that Melville was not perfectly

conventional. Typee, Omoo, and Mardi were critically

 

considered blasphemous. White-Jacket appeared to overtly
45

 

criticise the navy and was censored by doing so.
Melville's marriage to Elizabeth was more than a compromise
with conventionality. It was a choice: protection at the
cost of spiritual isolation. Melville had made a decision
to repress his need for what Martin Buber terms an I-Thou
relationship, a relationship where two individuals meet on
equal ground to learn and share experiences without any
attempt to control or limit one another's response.46
Melville had too many unmet needs to try for this highest
form of relationship between two people.

But even while Melville was protecting himself,
part of him knew that he was avoiding some aspects of
life. He shows this awareness indirectly, by empathizing
with Emerson's inability to interact more openly with the
world. In March,l849, he wrote to Duyckinck, exonerating
Ralph Waldo Emerson's conservativism and fear:

You complain that Emerson tho' a denizen of the
land of gingerbread, is above munching a plain

cake in company of jolly fellows, & swiging off
his ale like you & me. Ah, my dear sir, that's
his misfortune, not his fault. His belly, sir,
is in his chest, & his brains descend down into
his neck, & offer an obstacle to a draught of

ale or a mouthful of cake.47

Melville was not afraid of his ale, but he was afraid of

emotional vulnerability. Elements in his nature were

leading him toward risk. His relationship to Duyckinck

24

and Elizabeth were meeting his need for being nurtured.
He was ripe to try another, higher form of interaction.
His fear of intimacy was giving way to his painful dis-
satisfaction with remaining on the surface of life. In
Moby-Dick he was to write: ". . .better is it to perish
in that howling infinite,than be ingloriously dashed upon
the lee, even if that were safety!"48

After Melville returned from sea, he fulfilled

much of his need for risk-taking through his interaction

with literature. He was interested in The Book of

 

Solomon, Hamlet, King Lear, Religio Medici,and Anatomy of

Melancholy,49 books whose conclusions were self-consuming,

 

 

books which were explorations of process rather than

product.50

Sir Thomas Browne, for instance, in Religio
Medici, concluded that we are all in the same boat and
must survive through faith rather than proof, even though

the structure of his work is logical. Robert Burton, in

Anatomy of Melancholy, concluded his treatise in similar

 

fashion, stating that he could and would wish impossibil-
ities. Melville was finding fellow searchers in literature
rather than in life.

Morse Peckham discussed man's need to break
existing patterns, calling this tendency "man's rage for
chaos":

. . .we praise order because it is an adaptational
necessity for us that we experience order. And

our praise merely reinforces the greatest of all
human mottos: Millions for the orientation but

25

not one cent for reality. . . .We value order
for precisely the same reason we value a good
movement of the bowels. Both are human
necessities. The reasons for praising order
are comprehensible, but they are not impress-
ive. . . .They are not even exclusively human.

 

51

When feeling strong, Melville wanted to honestly search
more than he wanted to have comfort, protection,and
recognition. And Melville was becoming stronger. For
instance in 1845, he allowed his publishers to bowdlerize
HEB, deleting sexual and philOSOphical sections which

they thought might offend its audience,52

but by 1849
Melville decided that if his writing were to be less than
honest, it was not because he allowed his publishers to
change sections against his will. He defended Mardi
against both publisher and critic. He wrote in a letter
to Duyckinck, "Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's rain—
bow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter
than swing in any other man's swing."53

His belief in himself, his ability to be expansive,
was increasing, tentatively but regularly. He was starved
for people with whom to share and discover new ideas.

After writing Mardi, his most abstractly philos0phical and

worst reviewed book, he took a ship, the Southampton, to

 

London and Paris. During this trip he met two learned men,
Frank Taylor, a professor of modern languages at New York
University,and Dr. George J. Adler, a German—American
scholar. With these men, he talked of fixed fate, free

will, knowledge, absolute truths, topics of conversation

26

infrequently available to him in the Duyckinck circle.54
In Mardi he had stated: "We have had vast developments
of parts of men, not of any whole. Before a fully-

55 This

developed man, Mardi would fall down and worship."
echo of Ralph Waldo Emerson's language suggests Melville's
need for human confirmation and for increased bravery
within himself. Knowledge of his acceptance and the abil-
ity to accept others was essential for Melville's own self-
respect as it is for all sensitive persons. Martin Buber
describes these needs as the basis of relationships:

The basis of man's life with man is twofold, and

it is one -- the wish of every man to be confirmed

as what he is, even as what he can become, by men;

and the innate capacity in man to confirm his

fellow-men in this way.56

In his early life, Melville had learned not to
trust his family with his emotional parts and he remembered
his lesson never attempting to reveal those parts com-
pletely until he decided that Nathaniel Hawthorne was the
one person with whom he could have an absorbtively recip-
rocal relationship.
Whether this decision to attempt an Open, recip-

rocal relationship was made before or after meeting
Nathaniel Hawthorne is questionable: In July,1850

Melville's Aunt gave him a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's

Mosses from an Old Manse to read. Melville met Hawthorne

 

 

August 5, 1850. We do not know whether Melville had read

Mosses by this time,but we do know that on August 17 and

27
24 Melville wrote a review for publication in Duyckinck's

Literary World which sang the book's and author's praises,

 

marvelling at the originality that so affected him:

A man of deep and noble nature has taken hold of

me in this seclusion; his wild, witch-voice rings

through me; in softer cadences, I seem to hear it

in the song of the hillside birds that sing in

the larch trees at my window.58
Melville's narrative stance in this review, "Hawthorne
and His Mosses," is relaxed, inspired, one might even say
willfully seducible and seduced:

Stretched on that new mown clover, the hillside

breeze blowing over me through the wide barn

door, and soothed by the hum of the bees in the

meadows around, how magically stole over me this

Mossy Man! and how amply, how bountifully, did

he redeem that delicious promise to his guests

in the Old Manse, of whom it is written: 'Others

could give them pleasure, or amusement, or

instruction -- these could be picked up anywhere;

but it was for me to give them rest -- rest in a

life of trouble! What better could be done for

those weary and world-worn spirits?. . .'59
If Melville could find rest, then he could also find
safety, this time in a relationship with a great original
man. Melville, by seeing Hawthorne as a bringer of peace,
was making him as non-threatening and non-destructive as
possible. For the fifteen months that their relationship
lasted Melville tried to keep himself believing that he
had actually found the one person with whom he could share
his innermost thoughts and feelings without fear of
rejection. He could not perfectly convince himself that

this was so because he could not completely hide from

28

Hawthorne's non-reciprocity, but he obsessively clung to
his initial hope.

The germ of this hope can be explored in
"Hawthorne and His Mosses." Melville defines Hawthorne
in terms that he needs, even to the point of searching
Hawthorne's prose for a self-portrait which seems closer
to a portrait of Melville than one of Hawthorne:

"A man now entered, in neglected attire, with
the aspect of a thinker, but somewhat too rough-
hewn and brawny for a scholar. His face was full
of sturdy vigor, with some finer and keener
attribute beneath; though harsh at first, it was
tempered with the glow of a large, warm heart,
which had force enough to heat his powerful
intellect through and through. He advanced to
the Intelligencer, and looked at him with a
glance of such stern sincerity, that perhaps
few secrets were beyond its scope.

'I seek for Truth,‘ said he."50

He wants to see Hawthorne as a man with uncommon heart,
uncommon tenderness,and uncommon love. His heart judges
and finds Hawthorne's gold:
He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of
the mere critic. For it is not the brain that
can test such a man; it is only the heart. You
cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it;
there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except
by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch
it, and you find it is gold.
He searches Hawthorne's work for his own personality and
his own questions and finding them, responds with joy and
with relief:
Now, the page having reference to this Master

Genius, so happily expresses much of what I
yesterday wrote, touching the coming of the

29

literary Shiloh of America, that I cannot but be

charmed by the coincidence; especially, when it

shows such a parity of ideas, at least in this

one point, between a man like Hawthorne and a

man like me.62
Melville longs for bravery and originality and feels he
shares these desires with Hawthorne. He condemns imita-
tions, and finds Hawthorne original; he feels he can share
in Hawthorne's honor:

. . .and however great may be the praise I have

bestowed upon him, I feel that in so doing I have

served and honored myself, than him. For, at

bottom, great excellence is praise enough to it-

self; but the feeling of a sincere and appreciative

love and admiration towards it, this is relieved

by utterance, and warm, honest praise ever leaves

a pleasant flavor in the mouth. . . .53
Melville has waited a long time for such a man, and reveals
that in reading his book that he felt misty reminiscences,

64 And indeed Melville

as if he had been dreaming of him.
had dreamed of him; not Hawthorne, the man of flesh, but
Hawthorne the ideal who in his greatness and warmth would
heal Melville's loneliness. Finding the possibility of
unity with Hawthorne, Melville increases his sensitivity
toward fertility and sexuality.

Edwin Miller discusses the sexual phrases pre-
ponderant in Melville's review. Miller perceives that
his obsession with fertility and sexuality last past his
review. He notes that imagery of insemination continues

into Melville's subsequent letters:

. . .in a letter to Duyckinck, Melville was still
preoccuppied with the subject. He labelled the

30

twelve bottles of Champaigne 'beautiful babies'
in a 'wicker cradlea'and referred to the desk
in 'the garretway' as 'covered with the marks
of fowls -- quite white with them -- eggs had
been laid in it -- think of that -- Is it not
typical of these other eggs that authors may
be said to lay in their desks, -- especially
those with pigeon-holes?‘

Melville wanted to be born. Years of carefully protected
isolation were giving way to hunger, and in his starvation
he idealized Hawthorne to mythic proportion, the same
proportion to which he would have likedtx>feel himself
equal. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne noted Melville's over-
powering response to her husband in a letter addressed to
her mother:

He said Mr. Hawthorne was the first person whose

physical being appeared to him wholly in harmony

with the intellectual & spiritual. He said the

sunny hair & the pensiveness, the symmetry of

his face, the depth of eyes. . .' & the peace

supreme' all were in exact response to the high

calm intellect, the glowing, deep heart -- the

purity of actual & spiritual life.
Perhaps Melville, in his infatuation with Hawthorne, was
also working through feelings of repressed love for
Gansevoort, love he had never shown Gansevoort because of
his jealousy. As Miller perceptively notes in his
biography, both Hawthorne and Gansevoort have blond hair,
both are lithe and well formed and both have attractive

67 But Melville, in his attraction to Hawthorne,

faces.
is also reaching past his dead brother toward a heart

and soul with whom he could share his own search for

31

truth. Melville wanted a worthy colleague, an original,
not a copy:

And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author
of your own flesh and blood, -- an unimitating,
and, perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man --
whom better can I comment to you, in the first
place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is one of
the new, and far better generation of your
writers. The smell of young beeches and hem-
locks is upon him; your own broad prairies are
in his soul; and if you travel away inland into
his deep and noble nature, you will hear the
far roar of his Niagara.68

Hawthorne may have been twelve years Melville's senior,
but Melville concentrated his attention on the fact that
they were both striving for great achievement. Together
they would discover even deeper parts of their nature.
In "Hawthorne and His Mosses" he hints at this desire to
find his own essence:

. . .I somehow cling to the strange fancy, that,

in all men, hiddenly reside certain wondrous,

occult properties —- as in some plants and

minerals -- which by some happy but very rare

accident (as bronze was discovered by the

melting of the iron and brass at the burning of

Corinth) may chance to be called forth here on

earth; not entirely waiting for their better

discovery in the more congenial, blessed

atmosphere of heaven.59
Perhaps these wondrous properties might be better
discovered in heaven, but Melville, through his self-
searching and his relationship with Hawthorne, would
achieve what he could here on earth.

Melville was correct in assuming that many of the

conflicts that existed in him also existed in Hawthorne,

32

but he was incorrect in his belief that Hawthorne, when
given the chance for an intimate relationship, would
embrace it. While Melville was ready to break out of his
pattern of isolation by the time he met Hawthorne,
Hawthorne was unwilling to make any new changes in his
own life that would disorder it. He had moved to the
Berkshires to escape the ghost of his recently deceased
mother and he wanted to remain as clearly separate from
emotional situations as he could. He had left his
position at the Custom House, hoping to quit New York
forever.7o His response to his mother's death had been
overpowering: Sophia had feared that his emotional pain

71 Hawthorne had come to the

would lead to brain fever.
Berkshires to surround himself with nature, but he found
that he was more attached to the city than he had guessed.
The strain of his mother's death had put him in an un-
natural mental state, one that lasted a shorter period

of time than he, in the midst of mental turmoil, had
suspected.

When Melville met Hawthorne he was less trusting
than Melville would have liked. He was afraid to speak
directly and intimately to any person. He communicated
this fear in a letter:

. . .my theory is, that there (is) less in-
delicacy in speaking out your highest, deepest,

tenderest emotions to the world at large than
to almost any individual; but you cannot be

33

mistaken in thinking that, somewhere among your

fellow creatures, there is a heart that will

receive yoursinitself.72
Melville sensed that Hawthorne was a naturally hesitant
person. What Melville could not know was that Hawthorne
was probably more hesitant to make new commitments now
than ever before because of his mother's death. His
relationship with his mother had been painfully silent.
She never ate a meal with him until he had children of

his own.73

Hawthorne was unaccustomed to being embraced
by what he loved and hesitated to be demonstrative even
when emotionally involved. When his wife, for instance,
painted a tiny scene for him, he encased the picture in a
ring but found that he had difficulty wearing it. He
remarked to her that he could wear the ring better, if he
only liked it less.74
Hawthorne did meet Melville's desire for a

relationship with initial reciprocity; his response was
not equal to Melville's but it was positive. Within a
few days of their first meeting, Hawthorne wrote to his
friend Horatio Bridge: "I met Melville, the other day,
and I like him so much that I have asked him to spend a

75 But

few days with me before leaving these parts."
Melville was unsatisfied with a positive response. He
wanted unity. Later that year when Hawthorne was

obviously not meeting his intensity with equal fervor,

34

Melville ignored the reality of their relationship and
wrote to Hawthorne:

That side-blow thro' Mrs. Hawthorne will not do.
I am not to be charmed out of my promised
pleasure by any of that lady's syrenisms. You,
Sir, I hold accountable, & the visit (in all its
original integrity) must be made. -- What!

spend the day, only with us? -— A Greenlander
might as well talk of spending the day with a
friend, when the day is only half an inch long.

As I said before, my best travelling chariot
on runners, will be at your door, & provision
made not only for the accommodation of all your
family, but also for any quantity of ba a e.

Fear not that you will cause the slightest
trouble to us. Your bed is already made, & the
wood marked for your fire. But a moment ago, I
looked into the eyes of two fowls, whose tail
feathers have been notched, as destined victims
for the table. I keep the world "Welcome" all
the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the
instant when you cross the threshold.

(By the way the old Romans you know had a
Salve carved in their thresholds)

Another thing, Mr Hawthorne -- Do not think
you are coming to any prim nonsensical house —-
that is nonsensical in the ordinary way. You
must be much bored with punctilios. You may do
what you please -- say or say not what you
please. And if you feel any inclination for
that sort of thing -- you may spend the period
of your visit ig_bgd, if you like -- every hour
of your visit.

Mark -- There is some excellent Montado
Sherry awaiting you & some most potent Port.

We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered
toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles
from morning till night.

Come -- no nonsence. If you dont -- I will
send Constables after you.

On Wednesday then -- weather & sleighing
permitting I will be down for you about eleven
o'clock A.M.

By the way -- should Mrs. Hawthorne for any
reason conclude that she, for one, can not stay
overnight with us -- the? you must -- & the
children, if you please. 6

 

This is the first of the letters in the correspondence of
Melville with Hawthorne that are available or that have

77 It reveals Melville's insistence that

survived.
Hawthorne meet his needs, and his desire to displace the
blame of Hawthorne's lack of reciprocity, on Sophia.
Approximately a week before this letter had been sent,
Melville visited the Hawthornes at Lenox and they seem to
have agreed upon the visit that Melville speaks of, then.
Sophia seems to have sent a note changing the Hawthornes'
plans, and Melville reacted to this change with a great
deal of hostility towards Sophia. In this letter Melville
was attempting to convince Hawthorne that he could have

as much privacy as he wanted when the visit did come
about, but one still senses Melville's overpowering desire
to control, an insistence on closeness, and a deep fear
that Hawthorne may again refuse his offer.

In the midst of his belief that he had found his
soul-mate, the tension in Melville did not diminish. In
December 1850, almost seven weeks before the letter I
have just quoted was sent to Hawthorne, Melville revealed
in a letter to Duyckinck, that he was experiencing over—
whelming feelings of uncontrol:

I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country,
now that the ground is all covered with snow. I
look out of my window in the morning when I rise
as I would out of a porthole of a ship in the
Atlantic. My room seems a ship's cabin; & at

night when I wake up & hear the world shrieking,
I almost fancy there is too much sail on the

36

house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in

the chimney.78
Early in their relationship, Melville seemed to sense that
the new world he had put together between himself and
Hawthorne would not hold. Melville feared that his
relationship with Hawthorne might not give him the "I-Thou"
relationship for which he wanted to be prepared, but the
joy of possibilities, although intermingled with the
tension of its precariousness, was to be held as firmly
as possible. Melville was an adept rationalizer. He
could translate Hawthorne's silence into intelligence.

He allowed Ishmael a similar power in Moby-Dick:

 

. . .the whale has no voice; unless you insult

him by saying, that when he so strangely

rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then

again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have

I known any profound being that had anything

to say to this world, unless forced to stammer

out something by way of getting a living. Oh!

happy that the world is such an excellent

listener379
Throughout his relationship with Hawthorne he insisted on
distorting the man in such a way to avoid Hawthorne's
imperfection and withdrawal from him. He sensed
Hawthorne's artistic isolation, an isolation Hawthorne
explored in his short story, "The Artist of the Beautiful,"
when he had his narrator verbalize the importance of an
author's belief in himself, regardless of the fact that
he might be alone in this belief. Melville, reading the

story, triple scored the text:

37

It is requisite for the ideal artist to
possess a force of character that seems
hardly compatible with its delicacy; he
must keep his faith in himself, while
the incredulous world assails him with
its utter disbelief; he must stand up
against mankind and be his own sole
disciple, both as respects his genius,

and the objects to which it is directed.80

 

 

 

He was sure that Hawthorne could trust him and that knowing
this, Hawthorne would desire an "I-Thou" relationship as
much as he. He mentally transformed the shrinking
Hawthorne into a magnetic personality. Melville hid
Hawthorne's hesitancy from himself as much as he was able;
he needed Hawthorne's involvement with him too desperately
to be able to acknowledge emotional distance between them.
Thus, though Melville knew that "in the world of lies,
Truth is forced to fly like a sacred white doe in the
woodlands; and only by cunning glimpes will she reveal
herself,"81 he compulsively chased the doe until she
would reveal herself no longer.

Melville was in the midst of Moby-Dick and he

 

did not want to acknowledge his disappointment in the
relationship he had been brave enough to attempt. Uncon-
sciously, he must have felt that if he acknowledged the
precariousness of his relationship with Hawthorne that
this lack of personal safety would negatively affect his

honest search in Moby-Dick. Morse Peckham, a student of

 

the creative process, theorizes that without safety,

creativity is intolerable: "The life of the members of

38

that highest cultural level requires psychic insulation,
for only that makes problem exposure tolerable."82
Peckham notes that creative people often ally themselves
with social status, political power and wealth so that
they can use their energy to break patterns and create
new order. Melville did not have the creative energy to

deal honestly with Hawthorne's emotional reticence and

complete Moby-Dick.

 

Melville had begun the first version of Moby-Dick

 

before he met Hawthorne. This version, according to
Howard Vincent, was begun February 2, 1850 after Melville

had sold White-Jacket in London, and was almost completed

 

by the time he met Hawthorne in August. The previous May,
Melville had written a letter to Richard Henry Dana,
telling him that he was half done with his work. June 27,
he assured his editor, Richard Bentley, that the book would
be finished by August and in August, Evert Duyckinck
verified the fact that the novel was almost complete in a
letter he wrote to his brother George: "Melville has a
new book mostly done -- a romantic, fanciful and literal
and most enjoyable presentment of the whale fishery."
Vincent convincingly argues that only an important revision
can account for a fourteen month delay in finding Mobye
Dick a publisher: "It was not Melville's practice to let
his manuscripts gather dust. Upon looking over what he

had done he either sent it to the publishers or set to work

39

at revisions radical in character."83 The major revision
which was begun after he met Hawthorne took him fourteen
months to complete. It was finished September 1851,
during the second half of the Melville/Hawthorne relation-
ship.

It was a belief in life that Hawthorne elicited

in Melville that led to the recreation of Moby-Dick as we

 

know it. He was grappling with questions about selfhood

and the world's order: Moby-Dick was no longer a book

 

about whaling, but rather a book about people. The
idealized Hawthorne allowed Melville to feel expansive:
he was finally brave enough to have a fully—reciprocal
relationship with a great man, with a spiritual equal.
Melville was afraid to look at the real relationship he
was develOping with Hawthorne too closely for fear that
the lack of richness, the lack of reciprocity, would
cause him to stop feeling his own richness, and possibly
to lose that gigantic spirit in him which was creating

the fluid masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

 

Melville was never to work out his need for a
confirming relationship: no one ever fully confirmed him
as what he was, nor did he ever fully confirm another
human being. But with Hawthorne he had opened himself up
more than to any other person, and though he was not

brave enough to look directly at the person to whom he

40

was opening, this new flow of blood and spirit, this
newly awakened passion in him was creating a great work
of art.
Martin Buber comments on the infrequency of
successfully creating such relationships as the one
Melville wanted to attempt with Hawthorne:
That this capacity [to confirm and be confirmed by
another human being as what one is] lies so
immeasurably fallow constitutes the real weakness
and questionableness of the human race: actually
humanity exists only where this capacity unfolds.
On the other hand, of course, an empty claim for
confirmation without devotion for being and be-
coming, again and again mars the truth of the life
between man and man.84

By the end of their relationship the contact between

Hawthorne and Melville was becoming less and less realis—

tic. Melville refused Hawthorne's offer to be the

reviewer of Moby-Dick. He insisted that his dream of

 

Hawthorne's response to the book be as untouched by
reality as possible. The letter that he wrote to Hawthorne

thanking him for his response to Moby-Dick and for his

 

friendship feels more like the letter written at the end
of a friendship. Melville knew that he and Hawthorne
would never be the open friends of which he had dreamed.
He was still holding on to the fragments of its possibility
as best he could:
People think that if a man has undergone any hard-
ship, he should have a reward; but for my part, if

I have done the hardest possible day's work, and
then come to sit down in a corner and eat my

41

supper confortably -- why, then I don't think I
deserve any reward for my hard day's work -- for
am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?
My peace and my supper are my reward, my dear
Hawthorne. So your joy—giving and exultation-
breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher's
work with that book, but is the good goddess's
bonus over and above what was stipulated for --
for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will
expect appreciative recognition from his fellows,
or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition!
Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who
has got to the meaning of this great allegory --
the world? Then we pygmies must be content to
have our paper allegories but ill comprehended.

I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity.
In my proud, humble way, -- a shepherd-king, --

I was lord of a little vale in the solitary
Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of
India. But on trying it on my head, I found it
fell down on my ears, notwithstanding their
asinine length -- for it's only such ears that
sustain such crowns.

Your letter was handed me last night on the
road going to Mr. Morewood's, and I read it there.
Had I been home, I would have sat down at once and
answered it. In me divine maganimities are spon-
taneous and instantaneous -- catch them while you
can. The world goes round, and the other side comes
up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I felt
pantheistic then -- your heart beat in my ribs and
mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of
unspeakable security is in me this moment, on
account of your having understood the book. . . .

Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right
do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I
put it to my lips -- lo, they are yours and not
mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like
the bread at the Supper, and that we are the
pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.
Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns
over another page. You did not care a penny for
the book. But, now and then as you read, you
understood the pervading thought that impelled the
book -- and that you praised. Was it not so? You
were archangel enough to despise the imperfect
body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the
ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the
mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, -- the
familiar, -- and recognized the sound; for you have
heard it in your own solitudes.

42

My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms

steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my

sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am

not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever in-

coherent, and when the big hearts strike together,

the concussion is a little stunning. Farewell.

Don't write a word about the book. That would be

robbing me of my miserly delight. . 5
The letter continues, frequently changing tone, moving
from humor to pathos, from praise of Hawthorne to criticism
of his coldness, from deep need to ironic indifference.
When Melville mentioned that he was confused over where
Hawthorne begins and he ends, Melville was revealing the
unconscious truth behind the relationship: Melville, not
having himself, was searching for his own identity. He
had wanted Hawthorne to give him himself. What was most
attractive to Melville in Hawthorne was precisely that
part of Hawthorne that Melville felt within himself and
yet could not own. He had hinted of this as far back as
"Hawthorne and His Mosses:"

Now, it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which

I have spoken that so fixes and fascinates me

. . . .this blackness it is that furnishes the

infinite obscure of his background, that back—

ground against which Shakespeare plays his

grandest concerts. . . .36
It is his own blackness that Melville was trying to under-
stand. . .and his own light. If Melville was feeling

purified during the letter in which he had asked Hawthorne

not to write a review of Moby-Dick, it was not because of

 

the richness he had received from his relationship with

Hawthorne, but because in creating Moby-Dick, he had

 

43

reached a higher unity, a more powerful whole than he had
ever yet experienced. Momentary peace, momentary great-
ness is the best man can achieve. Melville had achieved

it by creating Moby-Dick. In 1849 he had emphatically

 

underscored a passage in Goethe's Autobiography, and it

 

had come to pass:

. . .in the end man is always driven back upon

himself, and it seems as if the Divinity has

taken a position towards men so as not always

to respond to their reverence, trust, and love,

at least not in the precise moment of need.37
Melville sensed that Hawthorne was deserting him and he
was correct. In the same letter where he asked Hawthorne

not to review Moby-Dick because he did not wish to be

 

robbed of his "miserly delight," he apologized for the
passion of his response: "What a pity, that, for your
plain, bluff letter, you should get such gibberish!"88

Yet he was not ready to let go of Hawthorne. Even against
his rational judgment he continued reaching out:

P.S. I can't stop yet. If the world was entirely
made up of Magians, I'll tell you what I should
do. I should have a paper-mill established at one
end of the house, and so have an endless riband of
foolscrap rolling in upon my desk; and up that end-
less riband I should write.a thousand -- a
million -- billion thoughts, all under the form of
a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and
my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A
foolish question -- they are One.

P.P.S. Don't think that by writing me a letter,
you shall always be bored with an immediate reply
to it -- and so keep both of us delving over a
writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sh'n't
always answer your letters, and you may do just as
you please.39

44

By the following year Hawthorne had left Pittsfield.
Hawthorne neither saved nor destroyed him, but gave him a
focus through which to explore the richness and horror of
his own soul. The relationship ended without Melville
ever understanding the one person with whom he had
attempted to completely share himself. He was not ready
for such sharing, then or at any other point of his life.
Melville never again tried to establish such a relation-
ship. He was never settled or secure enough to trust that

he would win.

NOTES -- SECTION I

1Edwin Miller, Melville (New York: George Braziller,
Inc., 1975), p. 179. Edwin Miller has explored Melville's
relationships between 1819-1851 in the greatest detail and
with the best psychological understanding to date. I am
indebted to him for his exploration, although our under-
standing of the psychological implications of these
relationships is sometimes different.

2Hawthorne, Julian, Hawthorne and His Wife, I
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896). P. 398, as cited in
Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner, and Mystic
(New York, 1921), p. 328.

 

 

 

3Howard P. Vincent, The Tr in -Out of "Mob -Dick"
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., ), pp. 22- .

 

4Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970). P. 30.

5Ronald D. Laing, Self and Others (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, Inc., 1969), p. 99.

 

6Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle
and Epicycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953),
p. 6.

 

 

7Victor Hugo Paltsits, Family Correspgndence 9f
Herman Melville: 1830-1904 (New York: The New York
Public Library, 1929), p. 4.

 

 

 

8Edwin Haviland Miller, p. 68.

9Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A_Documentary Life
of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, I (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1951): PP. 46; SI.

 

 

 

10MerrellR..Davis and William H. Gilman, eds. The
Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven: University Press,

1960), 7—83.

 

45

46

11Herman Melville, MobyéDick, ed. Charles Fiedelson,
Jr. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964), p. 53.

 

12Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William
Sloane Associates, Inc., 1950), p. 17.

 

l3Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The We;
9: Words and Wits i3 EQe EEE e: Poe and Melville—TNew York:
Harcourt,Brace and Co., 1956). P. 210. New York intellec-
tual life during the 1840's will be discussed later in my
study.

 

 

 

14"Timoleon" in Collected Poems e£_Herman Melville,
ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago, 1947), p. 211.

 

 

15Metcalf, pp. 124-5.

16Leyda, p. 435.

17Jeanne C. Howes, "Melville's Sensitive Years," in
A Symposium Melville Annual 1966, ed. Henry A. Murray
TKent: Kent State University Press, 1968), p. 39.

 

18Paltsits, pp. 4-5; Metcalf, pp. 1-12.

19Leyda, p. 110.

20Leyda, pp. 185; 195.

21Allen Wheelis, The Quest For Identity (New York:
Norton, 1958), pp. 162-3.

22Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: 5 Study 9: His
Life and Vision (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1962)! po 50.

 

 

23Mumford, p. 50.

24Leyda, p. 70. Melville's main function in Philo
Logos seemed to be participation in a letter-writing
battle. These letters were published in The Microscope.
The battle centered around the last election of the Philo
Logos club. The legality of this election was in question.

47

25Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville ee Lecturer
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). PP. 3-114;
David Mead, Yankee Eloquence 12 the Middle West: The
tho Lyceum 1850-1870 (East Lansing, Michigan State—College
Press, 1951), pp. 74F77.

 

 

26Newton Arvin, p. 75.

27Perry Miller, p. 31.

28Perry Miller, p. 210.

29Mumford, p. 4.

30Van Wyck Brooks, The Times e£_Melville and Whitman
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1947), p. 21.

 

31Abraham H. Maslow, Toward e Psychology 9: Being
(New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 196 , p. 9.

32Metcalf, p. 38.

33Mumford, p. 50. Mumford quotes Richard Lathers on
this observation.

34Metcalf, p. 56.

35Perry Miller, p. 210.

36Luther Stearns Mansfield, "Herman Melville: Author
and New Yorker, 1844-1851," Diss. University of Chicago
1936, p. 39. Duyckinck's diaries show that Melville wrote

him about once a month from 1876-1878.

37Davis and Gilman, p. 82.

38Arvin, p. 126.

39Leyda, p. 302.

4oMetcalf, pp. 48-49.

48

41Metcalf, p. 46.

42Metcalf, pp. 46-47.

43Leyda, p. 277.

44Arvin, p. 131.

45Arvin, p. 128.

46Buber, pp. 1-19.

47Davis and Gilman, p. 80.

48Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 149.

 

49Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading: 5
Check-List 9: Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 15-21.

 

50

 

 

Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consumin Artifacts (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972), Preface. Fish

argues that Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton do not
follow arguments along well lighted paths, but rather
force their readers to search out paths of their own.

51Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology,

Behavior and the Arts (Philadelphia: Chilton Co., 1965),
p. 39.

 

52Leyda, p. 200.

53Davis and Gilman, p. 78.

54Metcalf, pp. 72-73.

55Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither, IX

(London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1922), p. 323.

 

 

56Martin Buber, "Distance & Relationf'l957a,
Psychiatry 39. As quoted in R.D. Laing, p. 98.

 

57
Hayford,

Vincent:
"Melville and Hawthorne:
Critical Study," unpublished

58

Herman Melville, The
Sketches, ed., Henry Chapin,

p. 38.

49

Vincent

is using:

Harrison M.
A Biographical and
Yale dissertation,

1945.

Apple-Tree Table and other

 

1rHawthorne and His Mosses:

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1922), p. 53.

59Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses,"
pp. 56-70

60Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p.

61Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses,"
pp. 63-64.

2Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p.

63Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses,"
pp. 76-77.

4Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p.

65Edwin Haviland Miller, p. 32.

66Metcalf, p. 91.

67 . .

Edw1n Miller, p. 94.
68Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p.

69Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p.

70Robert Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne:

78.

83.

57.

75.

86.

The American

 

 

Years (New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1948);
Letter as cited on page 432.

71Cantwell, pp. 380; 431.
72Cantwell, p. 427.
73

Cantwell, pp. 380-4.

Hawthorne's

50

74Cantwell, p. 261.

75Cantwell, p. 426.

76Davis and Gilman, pp. 118-119.

7Davis and Gilman, p. 118.

78Davis and Gilman, p. 117.

79Melville, Mopy-Dick, pp. 477-8.

 

80Leyda, p. 381.

81Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p. 66.

82Morse Peckham, "Hawthorne and Melville as European
Authors," in Melville E Hawthorne $3 the Berkshires: 5
Symposium Melville Annual 1966, ed. Henry A. Murray (North
Carolina: Kent State University Press, 1968), p. 43.

 

 

 

83Vincent, PP. 25-6.

84Buber, "Distance and Relation," Laing, p. 98.

85Davis and Gilman, pp. 141-3.

86Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," p. 64.

87Leyda, p. 354.

88Davis and Gilman, p. 143.

89Davis and Gilman, pp. 143-144.

SECTION II

THE LINE AND CIRCLE IN MOBY-DICK: A STUDY OF
FLUID IMAGERY

 

Herman Melville transformed the defenses, fears
and confusion of his personal relationships into the

greatness of Moby-Dick. The book is great, not because it

 

is consistent, not because it gives us clean answers
concerning the world's order, but because Melville suc-
ceeded in keeping his artistic balance while breaking his

metaphorical patterns. The world of Moby-Dick is not

 

finally reductionist: Melville carefully avoided the
concretization that would render his ideas false. At its

best, Moby-Dick resists logical analysis; it leaves its

 

reader with a persistent sense of mystery.

While Herman Melville was unsuccessful in unfast-
ening the manacles of inhibition in his relationship with
Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was successful in attaining

fluidity in Moby-Dick. One way he did this was by creating

 

exploratory rather than fixed images: through the use of
the line and circle, Melville created a network of images
which he used to explore the danger and peace within his
world.

Let us begin with an example: the Grand Armada.
In this kaleidoscopic scene of sperm whales, Melville

51

52

begins, not by telling us about the whales directly, but
rather by telling us about our own location in space. The
reader, as well as the Peguod is about to enter the
Pacific Ocean, the most central ocean of the world. We
are influenced to feel as if we were entering a central
gateway opening into a vast walled empire, a world richer
and purer than our own; but this world is without any
physical gates. Ishmael develops this image:

The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied

with those domineering fortresses which guard the

entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and

the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals

do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered

top-sails from the endless procession of ships

before the wind, which for centuries past, by

night and by day, have passed between the islands

of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest

cargoes of the east.1
Yet, regardless of the fact that the Orientals waive
western-like ceremonials, piratical representatives
frequently sally through shadow, entering upon these
vessels from the west. They demand tribute, boarding and
pillaging, repaying the Europeans for their similarly
cruel chastisements.

But the Peguod enters the straits without meeting
pirates, without touching land. It is insulated, self-
sufficient:

While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff,
to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-
wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself
and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a

whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold
(p. 489).

53

Ahab parallels this insulation. Ishmael compares him to
the sun who for a long time "has raced within his fiery
ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself"

(p. 489). The circumnavigating Peguod, as well as her
captain, is equal to the supra-rich world where west
silently meets east. As the Peguod closes more and more
upon Java Head, floating between green palmy cliffs,
breathing cinnamon air, searching for the whales frequently
found in this central location, a cheering cry from the
masthead adds its contrapuntal ring to this magnificent
scene and the Peguod sees in the distance a caravan of
thousands: an extensive herd of sperm whales.

Ishmael, the perceptual artist, offers us a still-
point. The kaleidoscope is momentarily stopped and
Ishmael draws us a physical description of the scene:

Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or
three miles, and forming a great semicircle,
embracing one half of the level horizon, a contin-
uous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and
sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight
perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which,
dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like
the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single
forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents
a thick curled bush of mist, continually rising
and falling away to leeward (p. 490).
But he is unsatisfied with this technical vision. Ishmael
attempts to share the magic of haze and light:
Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would
rise on a high hill of the sea, this host of

vapory spouts, individually curling up into the
air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of

54

bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful

chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a

balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a

height (p. 490).
The kaleidoscopic scene changes. The fleet hurries for-
ward through the straits, as if to escape the Peguod.
They gradually contract the wings of their semicircle and
swim in one solid, but still crescentic center. The
caravan is before them, and Ishmael thinks of capturing
some of their number. Other members of the Peguod respond
similarly as the sails are raised and the harpooneers begin
handling their weapons. Weapon is held against whale:
linear object against curve. The scene is too simply
portrayed for the reader to easily ignore the contrast
between the line-like harpoon and the round moving mass of
whales. Melville well understands the power of tension
and he is employing it in his kaleidsc0pic scene. In Ee
Poétigue ee 1e Reverie, Gaston Bachelard, twentieth century
philosopher, explains the power of opposition:

Indeed what credit would snow deserve for being

white if its matter were not black, if it did

not come from the depths of its hidden being to

crystallize into its whiteness.2
The weapons of the harpooneers draw us back to the whale,
and we are also brought back to "Etymology," Melville's
introduction to the word,"whaleu'where he informs the
reader that the word ". . .comes from the Swedish and

Danish hval, meaning arched or vaulted. The whale is

named so because of its rolling and round nature" (p. 5).

55

The line and circle have not touched, but the potential
of meeting creates additional tension.

Ishmael, imaginatively, sees even more potential
tension. In the midst of these round, rolling things, he
searches for Moby Dick, the spiritually present center of
every whale scene in the novel.

And who could tell whether, in that congregated

caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily

be swimming, like the worshipped white-elephant

in the coronation procession of the Siamese! (p. 491).
And again the kaleidoscope turns as Tashtego's voice
directs attention to the rear. Ishmael has seen but half
of the picture: corresponding to the crescent before them
is another in the Peguod's rear. The crescent is unclear:
the spouts appear fragmented, shattering the curve,
replacing it with broken lines:

It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising

and falling something like the spouts of the

whales; only they did not so completely come and

go; for they constantly hovered, without finally

disappearing (p. 491).
But these were not the spouts of whales, rather they were
the Asiatic pirates pursuing the Peguod. Fate, metaphysics,
irony, directly enter the scene. Ahab, in Ishmael's
estimation, consciously responds to the ironic implications:

And when he glanced upon the green walls of the

watery defile in which the ship was then sailing,

and bethought him that through that gate lay the

route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that

through that same gate he was now both chasing

and being chased to his deadly end; and not only
that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and

56

inhuman atheistical devils were infernally

cheering him on with their curses; -- when all

these conceits had passed through his brain,

Ahab's brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the

black sand beach after some stormy tide had been

gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm

thing from its place (pp. 491-2).
Other lines, those on Ahab's forehead are brought into the
foreground of the kaleidoscope. Momentarily, they conflict
for power, and then Melville changes the focus of his
narrative. We leave tormented Ahab to again focus on the
other sailors on the Peguod who have left the Malays behind
only to grieve that the whales had been gaining. Gradually
the Peguod nears them, lowering its boats. More lines
appear: the whale spouts look like flashing lines of
stacked bayonets. Again the kaleidoscope turns and the
whales seem mad in their consternation:

In all directions expanding in vast irregular

circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and

thither, by their short thick spoutings, they

plainly betrayed their distraction of panic

(p. 493).
From violence, irregular circles, short broken lines, we
move to Ishmael's vision of stasis. Ishmael observes
that though many of the whales are violently moving, that
the herd neither advances nor retreats. Queequeg flings
his harpoon, strikes a whale, and it steers for the heart
of the herd. Ishmael is no longer simply observing the
kaleidoscopic vision from the outside; he is quickly

moving toward its center, becoming a central part of its

movement. With short darts, Starbuck pricks whales out of

57

the boat's wake. A number of other whales are winged
with druggs and finally, Starbuck's boat finds itself in
the innermost heart of the shoal:

Here the storms in the roaring glens between the

outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In

this central expanse the sea presented that smooth

satin-1Uuasurface, called a sleek, produced by the

subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his

more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that

enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart

of every commotion (p. 496).
Hemmed in by a living wall, Ishmael watches the tumults
of the outer concentric circles. He notes successive
pods of whales travelling shoulder to shoulder in a ring;
he imagines them to be horses in a circus: "A Titanic
circus-rider might easily have overarched the middle ones,
and so have gone round on their backs" (p. 497). This
time the kaleidoscope turns slowly as the members of
Starbuck's boat are visited by cows and calves. Their
confidence is met with equal innocence on the part of the
whalemen:

Like household dogs they came snuffling round us,

right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till

it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly

domesticated them. Queequeg patted their fore-

heads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his

lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the

time refrained from darting it (p. 497).
The whales are no longer passive objects; they,by their
behavior, are demanding certain responses. The cows and

calves in their innocence have gained control and have

demanded that the scene of horror be momentarily

58

transformed into a scene of peace. Gaston Bachelard calls

this power, "trans-subjectivity."3 Melville uses it to

give texture to his already textured scene.

In the center of this enchanted calm, the reader
remains suspended, watching mothers nurse their calves.
Ishmael again turns the kaleidosc0pe, projecting the

infants' world:

. . .as human infants while suckling will calmly
and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if
leading two different lives at the time; and while
yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spirit-
ually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;
-- even so did the young of these whales seem
looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we
were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born
sight (p. 497).

But the scene is not to remain peaceful. The mother of
an infant who is still attached to her by the umbilical
cord is stricken. Queequeg cries out in empathy and
Starbuck sees the rope and cord entangled, entrapping the
infant.

Peace is to be only momentary. Line coldly cuts
through circle shattering curves:

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional
sudden frantic spectacles in the distance evinced
the activity of the other boats, still engaged in
drugging the whales on the frontier of the host;

or possibly carrying on the war within the first
circle, where abundance of room and some convenient
retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the
enraged drugged whales now and then blindly

darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing
to what at last met our eyes (p. 499).

59

A terrific object recalls the whole herd from its
stationary fright. This object is a struck whale who has
run away with a loose cutting-spade in him. Tormented to
madness, he swims through the water, wounding and murder-
ing his own comrades as he churns in a broken, irregular
fashion.

Again the kaleidoscope rotates. The entire host
of whales tumbles upon the inner center. Starbuck and
Queequeg change places and Starbuck attempts to steer the
boat out of the crescendic mountain. The boat escapes,
losing only Queequeg's hat. The fleet again becomes
peaceful:

Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion

now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed

a systematic movement; for having clumped together

at last in one dense body, they then renewed their

onward flight with augmented fleetness (p. 501).
There is no further pursuit. Only one drugged whale is
captured. The scene disperses.

Katharine Kuh, modern art critic, in her discus-
sion of the modern world, could be referring to the
kaleidosc0pic scenes which Melville presents to us in
this whale scene. In discussing the technique of modern
artists, Kuh could be explaining Melville's use of physical
detail:

Unexpectedly the world shrinks as it expands;
there is a great deal more to see, and yet we

see it faster. In trying to condense modern
multiplicity into tangible form, artists have

60

turned to certain shortcuts, to transparent,

fragmented, reconstructed images where two

compelling illusions -- speed and space --

act as basic source material.4
In this chapter, Melville is attempting to show the reader
the myriad sides and implications of a world, where each
gestalt gives way to another, different, not always
directly connected,vision. Melville concentrates on one
motion, only to allow its dispersion. Each foreground
submerges back into the spectrum of experience; some
scenes linger longer, others passively melt away.
Melville's end product becomes a montage of his fragmented
visions; he has used both concrete detail and psychological
suggestion to reconstruct as honest a world as possible.

The archetypal symbols of line and circle adapt

easily to the syncopated rhythm of Melville's vision. He
is fascinated by them because they have both the qualities
of mystical transcendence and cold, unrelenting destruction.
He is also enthralled by their fluidity: the line endless-
ly turns on itself, narrowing to a still point, widening
to infinity. These images seem to have the power of their
own volition, enlarging only to break apart, closing only
to reopen. They allow Melville to explore his world as a
scattered totality, existing in incomprehensible pieces,

inviting people's dreams and fears.

Georges Poulet, in The Metamorphosis e: the Circle,

 

 

discusses the power of the circle which has the double

61

generating force of the point: it prolongs itself into a
line and begets concentric circles:

There is no more 'accomplished' form than the
circle. No form more lasting, either. The
circle that Euclid describes and the one which
modern mathematics traces, not only resemble one
another but merge with one another. The dial of
the clock, the wheel of fortune, traverse time
intact, without being modified by the variations
which they register or determine. Each time the
mind wants to picture space, it sets in motion a
selfsame curve around a selfsame center. No
matter what the degree of angle may be, men of
all epochs have used only one compass.5

The tension and fluidity that the different aspects of the
circle and line allow are one of the main reasons that
Melville is so attracted to this specific network of
images.

In Moby-Dick, Melville has Ishmael verbalize his

 

awareness of the power fluidity gains through tension.
Ishmael narrates his experience of being snugly in bed,
connecting his comfort to his awareness that the room is
slightly chilled:

Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter your-
self that you are all over comfortable, and have
been so a long time, then you cannot be said to

be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg
and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the
crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then,
indeed, in the general consciousness you feel more
delightfully and unmistakably warm (p. 86).

Melville relies on the power of tension to create the

atmosphere of Moby-Dick. He has Ishmael describe the

 

Peguod encountering vast meadows of brit and shows the

62

Peguod sailing through these boundless fields of ripe and
golden wheat only to have right whales break the symmetry
by mercilessly feeding on them:

As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and

seethingly advance their scythes through the

long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these

monsters swam, making a strange, grassy,

cutting sound; and leaving behind them end-

less swaths of blue upon the yellow sea (p. 361).

Other critics have noted the vast amount of tension

in this work. Robert Zoellner's reading of Moby-Dick is

 

accurately based on the power of tension in the novel:

From beginning to end, Mopy-Dick is dominated by
the shark's saw-pit mouth and charnel of maw.

Into that gaping, apparently bottomless rictal
void everything must go. All things are, finally,
consumed. It is this sense of both cosmic
activity and life process as hideously predacious,
devouring kind of business, that makes Moby-Dick
the supremely horrible book it is.6

 

 

He correctly relates this power to the cannibalism/rebirth

motif recurrently present in Moby-Dick. Melville begins

 

his book by depicting a presently dead, consumptive usher

who prepared the "Etymology" section on the meaning of

the word,"whale3' Melville tells us of his life:
The pale Usher -- threadbare in coat, heart, body,
and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his
old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handker-
chief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags
of all the known nations of the world. He loved to
dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded
him of his own mortality (p. 3).

The usher seems self-consuming in his controlled movement

toward order, and in his will to die. He mocks his

consumption, his mortality, caring nothing for the limited

63

world he will never directly experience. Most enchained,
it is ironically the usher who is most free.

Even the image of the Peguod is one of mocking
cannibalism, indifferent to its own mortality and to the
mortality surrounding it:

She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian
emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished
ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal
of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased
bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled,
opened bulwarks were garnished like one contin-
uous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm
whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old
hempen thews and tendons to (p. 105).

And of course the sea is the most powerful cannibal of

all. Ishmael, fearing his mortality, points out its

deceptive power:
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most
dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent
for the most part, and treacherously hidden
beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider
also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many
of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty
embellished shape of many species of sharks.
Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism
of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
other, carrying on eternal war since the world
began (pp. 363-4).

At points of the novel Ishmael may jest about
cannibalism, but this complicates rather than decreases
the tension, simply adding another level to the intricate
montage already created. Ishmael tells us there is evil
in the fact that man feeds upon the creature that feeds

his lamp and like Stubb, eats him by his own light. By

64

playing with human cruelty he attempts, unsuccessfully,
to dissuade himself from fearing it:
. . .and everyone knows that some young bucks
among the epicures, by continually dining upon
calves' brains, by and by get to have a little
brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a
calf's head from their own heads; which, indeed
requires uncommon discrimination. And that is
the reason why a young buck with an intelligent
looking calf's head before him, is somehow one
of the saddest sights you can see. The head
looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an
‘EttnlBrute!' expression (p. 393).
Ishmael's seriousness became part of the foreground again,
when he asks the reader to confess his own cannibalism.
People, he insists, are not much different from sharks
who viciously snap at each other's disembowelments and
"like flexible bows, bent round," bite their own, until
those entrails seem "swallowed over and over again by
the same mouth" (p. 395).
The power of this cannibalistic imagery, as
Zoellner points out, lies not only in its dialectical

tension but also in the circularity of the life process.

Yvoquinters, in his analysis of Moby-Dick,implies that

 

the novel's power comes not from this circular, cannibal-
istic synthesis, but from the duality of the imagery.

Specifically, Winters sees the basis of Moby-Dick's power

 

as coming from the antithetical qualities of land and sea,
the land representing the known, the master and the sea,
the half known, obscure region of uncritical instinct,

danger and terror.7

65

Winters is focusing on the power of opposition in

Melville's creation of the imagery in Moby-Dick, rather

 

than the fact that he uses the power of opposition, but
is also aware that there are complexities in nature which

go beyond dualism. Tension, in Moby-Dick, does not only

 

come from conflicting opposites, but also from the complex
nature of each element. For instance, when Melville has
Ishmael explore the meaning of land, he has Ishmael
verbalize his awareness that land does not always imply
safety:

The port would fain give succor; the port is
pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearth-
stone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's
kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the
port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy;
she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land,
though it but graze the keel, would make her
shudder through and through (p. 148).

Melville has Starbuck share Ishmael's sensitivity to a
complexity that transcends dualism. Starbuck, deciding he
should act, finds forces working within him which are
stronger than logic, forces which cause him to passively
acquiesce to Ahab's power:

'I come to report a fair wind to him. But how
fair? Fair for death and doom. -- that's fair
for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only
fair for that accursed fish. . . .shall this
crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a
whole ship's company down to doom with him?

. . . .he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but
still alive, and soon awake again. I can't
withstand thee, then, old man' (pp. 650-1).

66

Melville freely plays with dualism, but is not limited to
it: the innocent Pip may adore the diabolical Ahab;
ambergris, the sweetest of all matter, may be found only
in the bowels of sick whales, but Melville uses this
information to explore rather than reduce his world.
Correspondences also play an important part in

Melville's world, but these correspondences also explore
rather than define nature. Ishmael notes patterns
frequently and shares them with his reader. When Ahab
moves on board the Peguod, Ishmael comments, pointing out
the patterns being formed:

Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to

and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so

familiar to his tread, that they were all over

dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar

mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon

that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would

see still stranger foot-prints -- the foot-prints

of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought (p. 216).
When Ahab draws the chart which defines Moby Dick's watery
journey, Ishmael notes that a rocking lamp is sending off
rays which are marking his forehead:

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended

in chains over his head, continually rocked with

the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting

gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow,

till it almost seemed that while he himself was

marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled

charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing

lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of

his forehead (p. 267).
These hieroglyphical signs which hint of higher, if

parallel, truths, are not limited to Ahab. They are also

67

associated with Queequeg, whose tattoos invite reading
but firmly remain incomprehensible. Ishmael comments
that no person, not even Queequeg, can comprehend their
import:

And this tattoding,had been the work of a departed
prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hier-
oglyphic marks, had written out on his body a
complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
mystical treatise of the art of attaining truth;

so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a
riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume;
but whose mysteries not even himself could read,
though his own live heart beat against them. . .
(p. 612).

Mysterious markings also distinguish Moby Dick from other
whales. Messages also appear on his body in the form of
a snow-white wrinkled forehead, but they too remain
undefined (p. 245).

Patterns emerge everywhere in Moby-Dick, but the

 

more they are understood, the more one realizes that their
outward portents are most likely giving a false impression.
The whale skeleton, for instance, gives little indication
of the whale's true shape (p. 351). Even if understood
perfectly, they gain humans little control. When a fiery
message burns on the masthead, Ishmael admits that even

if this message were understood, the fate of the individ-
uals on board the Peguod would most likely not be affected.
The sailors are in no better position than Belshazzar.

When Belshazzar noted the writing on the wall, "Mene, Mene,
Tekel, Upharsin," he requested that the message be inter-

preted. The prophet, Daniel, offered his services,

68

analyzing the anagram: “God hath numbered thy kingdom
and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balances
and are found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided and given
to the Medes and Persians." Knowing this, Belshazzar
could prevent nothing: there would be painful destruction.
That night Belshazzar died in his sleep.8
The complex patterning of the world brings pain,

for it reminds humans of the passage of time, and of their
lack of control. In the bower in the Arsacides, Ishmael
responds to the beauty and horror of his vision:

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as

mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and

haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious

earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a

gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine

tendrils formed the warp and woof. . . .Through

the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed

a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh,

busy weaver! unseen weaver! -- pause! -- one word!

-- whither flows the fabric? what palace may it

deck? wherefore all this ceaseless toilings?

(p. 573).
Even minor characters are aware of the intricate corre-
spondences within the universe and fear their own lack of
power. At midnight, fantasies thread through the fore-
castle, passing from the Maltese to the Sicilian and
finally to the Tahitian sailor. He reclines on his mat,
perceiving the vague female shape which fades from his
mat:

'Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls! --

the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed
Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the

69

soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood,
my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence;
now worn and wilted quite. Ah me! -- not thou
nor I can bear the change!‘ (p. 235).

Melville's novel seems motivated by his desire to
present a world that may be limited in terms of individual
character's views, but when these views are taken simul-
taneously, form a gestalt which is more than the sum of
their individual parts. For instance, fascinated with
roundness, he has Ishmael respond to it in many forms.

It is the ocean which is cannibalistic, but it is also
the ocean, specifically the Pacific, which zones the
world's whole bulk, making all coasts its bay; it is the
ocean which is the "tide beating heart of earth" (pp. 613-
14). It is also the ocean whose water can curl and hiss
around him like the circled crest of enraged serpents
(p. 300). The Pacific, the most central ocean, is the most
alluring to him:
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about
this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to
to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the
buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is,
that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents,
the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow
unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and
shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries;
all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming,
dreaming,still; tossing like slumberers in their

beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their
restlessness (p. 613).

70

Ishmael, from the beginning of his tale, clearly convinces
us that it is the fluidity of water which lures all people
to it:

Say, you are in the country; in some high land

of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and

ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and

leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There

is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of

men be plunged in his deepest reveries -- stand

that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and

he will infallibly lead you to water, if water

there be in all that region. Should you ever be

athirst in the great American desert, try this

experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied

with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one

knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever

(pp. 24-25).

Different characters on the Peguod are drawn to
various forms of this roundness. The Manxman, for instance,
fixates his attention on the ring which he sees as the
central metaphor for the world's action. When Daggoo and
a Spanish sailor spring at one another on the ship's
forecastle at midnight the Manxman insists that the men
form a ring in which to fight. He shouts at the angry
sailors: "'There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain
struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God,
mad'st thou the ring?'" (p. 238). The Manxman, himself a
circle within a circle, a man from Man, is obeyed.

The question concerning the ultimate good or evil
of the ring remains unanswered, but it is further, if in-
directly, explored. Ahab uses the circle in a blasphemous

ritual where he has the Pequod's sailors swear their loyalty

to his vindictive and blasphemous quest after Moby Dick

71

(p. 223). He has the harpooneers forma central circle
while the rest of the sailors form a larger circle around
them. The grog is then passed around the circles, spiral-
izing like a serpent, once again connecting line to
circle. Later, reviewing the ceremony, Ahab describes
himself as a cogged wheel that fits into the crew's various
wheels. Melville leaves the reader with a kaleidoscopic
set of fragments. Circles and lines interpenetrate; the
ultimate meaning remains undefined.

Indestructable rings attach themselves to death
and madness. When Queequeg is sick, Ishmael,fearing his
death,sees indestructable rings in the place of his eyes,
rings which would lead Queequeg away from him: "'And like
circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand;
so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings

of Eternity (p. 607). Expanding, rolling rings may lead
to transcendence, but they also may lead to death. When
Pip becomes mad, Ishmael states that his ringed horizon
had expanded around him miserably, creating a sense of
vastness which denied his integrity (p. 53).

The dangerous implications of roundness recede

into the background of Moby-Dick, as Melville explores the

 

healing aspects of the ring. When Samuel Enderby's sons,
the great whalers of the eighteenth century, gained power,
they did so,according to Ishmael, in the form of ever-

expanding rings: they opened up sea after sea for sailing,

72

as pebbles thrown in water create ever-widening rings,
expansive mirrors of themselves (p. 566).

Sailors are enchanted by rings, but are also afraid of
them. Melville will not let us forget that Ishmael, when
on the mast-head, transcended in reverie, but at the cost
of hovering unconsciously above Descartian vortices

(pp. 214-15). Ishmael risks drowning when most at peace
with himself.

In Moby-Dick, the doubloon serves as a compelling
symbol of roundness to which a number of main characters
respond. Ishmael tells us that this sixteen dollar piece
comes from a land of central location, the Republic of
Ecuador, named after the great equator, the imaginary
line that cuts through the earth's roundness. The fact
that this round coin was cast midway up the Andes in an
unwaning clime that knew no autumn, reinforces its power
of centrality, its power of roundness. Ishmael, in
describing it, captures its sanctity:

Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold,
raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous
hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands,
the headwaters of many a Pactolus flows. And
though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of
iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes,
yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness,
it still preserved its Quito glow (p. 549).
Ahab in studying its pictorial face, sees himself mirrored

in its tower, volcano and fowl. He stops studying its

marks only to turn to its shape:

73

'. . .and this round gold is but the image of the
rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to
each and every man in turn but mirrors back his
own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for
those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot
solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears
a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of
storms, the equinox! and but six months before he
wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From
storm to storm!‘ (p. 551).

In the midst of studying its shape, he has turned once
again to markings, this time to notice that in the very
stasis of the patterns is the material which allows flux:
the sun is entering autumn, a fact which elicits in Ahab
a sense of the spring it left behind only half a year ago.
He ends his soliloquy feeling fated, caught in a circular
pattern he did not create:
'From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in
throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains
and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout
stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then' (p. 551).
Starbuck, noting Ahab's depression as he reads the
coin's meaning, decides to also inspect the coin. He
attempts to read human choice into its roundness, but his
optimism gives way to his fear of a fluid world:
A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding
peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds
us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of
Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hOpe. If
we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy
soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our
glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun
is no fixture. . . (p. 551).

Thus Starbuck's comforting gestalt gives way to a gloomy

one. He, too,is saddened by the fact that he cannot see the

74

the sun at will. The sun has its own rhythms, its own
balance; it is no object to Starbuck's needs. He quits
the coin, fearing the lack of control he has himself
depicted.

Stubb, viewing the doubloon, also focuses his
attention on the sun, the sun which is consistently present,
which cannot be escaped. Yet, he too sees movement beyond
his control. Although he may cry,"'Book! you lie there;
the fact is, you books must know your places '"(p. 553),
continues to study this pictorial depiction of the almanac,
and he sees within it the life of man in one round chapter.
He refuses to be depressed by this lack of control, for as
long as life continues, he is satisfied. At the end of
his soliloquy, he verbalizes this contentment: "'There's
a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through
it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and
hearty'" (p. 554).

His version stays in the foreground momentarily,
only to recede as Flask steps up to the doubloon and adds
his understanding to the montage. For him the doubloon
is but sixteen dollars. The Manxman also stops before the
doubloon, studies the zodiacal work for a moment and then
decides to look at the back end of the mast. Noticing a
horse-shoe nail, he concludes that the whale will be raised
in the horse-shoe sign, Leo. Stubb notes that each new

rendering adds to the same text. When Queequeg appears,

75

he fancies that Queequeg first compares notes and then
signs to the signs on the doubloon. Pip appears and
Stubb,fearful of his madness,withdraws.

Pip is the last member of the crew to study the
doubloon and add his rendering to the other interpretations.
He becomes the crow and his caw is one of doom:

'Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and
they are all on fire to unscrew it. But unscrew

your navel, and what's the consequence? Then again,
if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught's
nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow
desperate. . . . Oh, the gold! the precious,

precious gold! -- the green miser '11 hoard ye soon!
Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds blackberrying'

Using the physical image of the doubloon, Melville
explores the metaphysical implications of roundness.
Melville has invited us to concentrate on each of the
above character's versions of reality, only to allow each
one to disperse as it came. Melville has us leave the
doubloon with no definitive theory, only to enter another
chapter, "Leg and Arm," to discover Captain Boomer, who
like Ahab has lost a limb in trying to capture Moby Dick.
The accepting Captain Boomer becomes a contrasting figure
to the angry Ahab. Boomer has discovered that the White
Whale is best let alone, an opposite conclusion to Ahab's.
Again and again Melville introduces problems to explore
rather than define them.

The doubloom is the physical center through which

Melville explores roundness; Ishmael is the psychological

76

center through which this exploration takes place. When
we meet him he is at a still-point, attempting to act in
a non-destructive manner:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind
how long precisely -- having little or no money

in my purse, and nothing particular to interest

me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little
and see the watery part of the world. It is a
way I have of driving off the spleen, and
regulating the circulation. . . .whenever my hypos
get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a
strong moral principle to prevent me from
deliberately stepping into the street, and method-
ically knocking people's hats off -- then, I
account it high time to get to sea as soon as I
can (p. 23).

Being a water-gazer is one way of moving from the still-
point into something possibly less dangerous. Yet one
must be careful not to move too directly. In the intro-
ductory chapter, Melville has Ishmael recall the story
of Narcissus, who moved outward by gazing into water,
only to drown in his newly acquired longing. If we move
outward we must be careful not to move too quickly toward'
the ungraspable phantom of life, for we are no more likely
to capture it than was Narcissus. Ishmael discusses this
need for the unattainable, this need for the center of
things, for our own essence:

And still deeper the meaning of that story of

Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the

tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain

plunged into it and was drowned. But that

same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and

oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable

phantom of life; and this is the key to it
all (p. 26).

77

Ishmael,himse1f at a still-point,is preparing us for our
own journey which will be through concentric circles and
through the radii which both divide and form the circum-
ference. In his own movement outward, Ishmael will
travel through both the line, dark narrow streets, and
through the circle of his own concentric visions. He is
unsure how best to progress. He is attracted to the more
circular exploration of metaphysics, but he feels compelled,
as much as possible,to make his journey linear. He ends
his chapter "The Spouter-Inn," using both methods of
progression: he discusses paradox but then promises us
logical detail:

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on

the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is

more wonderful than that an iceberg should be

moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself,

he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of

frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance

society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are

going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet

to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted

feet, and see what sort of a place this 'Spouter'

may be (p. 35).
Even, as during the last paragraph, when Ishmael verbalizes
his desire to proceed directly, he cannot help but shatter
his direct approach by offering us puns such as 'blubber-
ing,‘ and he surreptitiously returns to his previous ice-
berg image by referring to our frosted feet. Ishmael

speaks of going directly but his very language curves

around itself.

78

Through the personality of Ishmael, direct and
indirect methodologies, the line and circle. fight for

supremacy. But in Moby-Dick both methodologies emanate

 

from the same source: the still-point.

Ishmael is searching for the meaning of the center,
and he is aware that he does not even understand his own
interior space:

Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine
is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the
chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a
little lint here and there. But it's too late to
make any improvements now. The universe is finished;
the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a
million years ago (p. 34).
His surroundings remind him of his lack of control. He
tries to be fluid, accepting, but he puzzles after stable
meaning. When he spends his first evening at Nantucket,
he is allured by an oil painting. What puzzles him most
about the picture is something round and indestructible
hovering at its center, something beyond crossed and
recrossed lines. He attempts several theories concerning
the picture's meaning, finally formulating the following
theory:
The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great
hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there
with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and
an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean
over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling
himself upon the three mast-heads (pp. 36-7) .

In this picture the whale, representing roundness, is

crossed by three lines which implant themselves in it.

79

But perhaps, even more important, the reader should
observe. that it is a central roundness which so fasci-
nates Ishmael. Again and again, it will be a central
image which comes into Ishmael's foreground. From the
outset of his journey, round, insulated things have

seized his attention. He depicts Manhattan as an insular
city. At Father Mapple's church, he notices the insularly
constructed platform. There he finds yet another painting
to analyze. In this picture, high above the flying scud
and dark-rolling clouds, floats a little isle of sunlight.
For Ishmael, this isle, another round, rolling object,
this time with an angel's face, is the center of the
picture. It beckons the ship past the storm; it brings
hope beyond itself.

Ishmael is aware that the center is likely to
create reverberating horrors if tampered with indelicately:
Pip is the living embodiment of his fear. But regardless
of the danger, Ishmael remains fascinated with the center.
He even notices that the power of the whale leads down to
a concentrated point:

But as if this vast local power in the tendinous
tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the
leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on
either side the loins and running down into the
flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely
contribute to their might; so that in the tail

the confluent measureless force of the whole
whale seemed concentrated to a point (pp. 481-2).

80

Outwardly, this point may appear to be little more than a
child's bauble. Ishmael notices that the children of the
Arsacides play with the end bones of whales as if they
were no more impressive than marbles (p. 579), but objects,
as he explores them, seem to have the power of trans-
subjectivity. For Ishmael, the point remains surrepti-
tiously potent.

Ishmael explores other methods of moving from the
center: circles fascinate him and so do lines. The rcpe,
the physical embodiment of the line, at times seems as
unimpressive as the end bone of a whale's tail, but as he
studies it, it,too,seems to have unexplicable power.

Herman Melville's genius lies in his ability to
fuse inner and outer realities. His images of the circle
and line reach down past the material, delicately touching
the elemental. F. O. Matthiessen praises Melville's
reliance on the physical world -- a world he carefully
uses to prevent his drama from gliding off into a space

9 And Melville

where the reader can feel no normal ties.
earns this praise because he has the rare ability to be
simultaneously earthly and ethereal. He is the surrealist
born of physical ardor; he is the alchemist tied to, but
not controlled by the engineer.

As Mathew Arnold states, every great composer

10

makes his own vehicle, and for Melville this vehicle is

the whaling industry. Within this industry there are

81

sufficient images of roundess and linearity so that he
can intricately study various methods of progression,
various methods of achieving order.

One of the central tools of this industry is rope.
It infiltrates almost every area of whaling. Rope is part
of the boat and part of the chase -- it attaches sails
and it is tied to harpoons. Rope gives the seaman his
place, his security and at times his death. It connects
to the round images of whale and ship, and it curves,
itself becoming a round object that Melville can explore
through the consciousness of Ishmael and other members of
the Pequod's crew.

Melville exaggerates the rope's nature in order
to increase dramatic effect and perhaps, less consciously,
because he is afraid to trust so chameleon an instrument.
For instance, most whaleboats have rope running down
their centers, but Melville, in designing the Peguod,
creates a line that runs all around the boat. He chooses
to deal with the rope in all its complexity, uniting
qualities of good and evil, of treachery and control.
Melville also uses the strengthening power of opposition
by connecting all four elements to rope: fire is
represented by the blue light the rope emits when moving
quickly; air is represented by the presence of smoke;
water is represented by the element through which the

line moves during the whale hunt; and earth is the

82

physical rOpe itself, always present on the whale ship
and always potentially volatile.

Just as Ishmael is fascinated by the center of
things and their circular reverberations, he is also
fascinated by the center's radii. The line is a method
of moving outward, a method of making contact. But just
as the circle can destroy, so can the line: it is the
umbilical cord that can bring life, yet wrapped tightly
around the infant's neck it will impair breathing and
therefore kill. Ishmael verbalizes his distrust of it:

. . .the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of

the storm; and contains it in itself, as the

seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder,

and the ball. . .so the graceful repose of the

line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsman

before being brought into actual play -- this is

a thing which carries more of true terror than

any other aspect of this dangerous affair (p. 372).
Ishmael is aware that if the whale line has even the
slightest kink, it, while moving, will easily remove an
arm or leg (p. 376). The fact that the layers of
concentric spiralizations may look like cheese simply adds

to his fear of rope.

The rOpe, in Moby-Dick, is so powerful that it is

 

used to differentiate characters. Starbuck's relationship
to the rope is inactive: he passively stands attached to
a shroud watching a storm. Stubb and Flask choose to
ignore the shroud: instead they make sure the masts are

bound firmly to the railings, attempting to be as practical

83

as possible. Ahab challenges the ropes, as he challenges

everything else:
. . .with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted
through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried
out to the steersman to take new turns with the
line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to
turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up
to the mark; the moment the treacherous line
felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in
the empty air (p. 718).

Ahab wants more from the rope that it can give him.

Ropes are intricately connected to dreaming, and
thus to the transcendent nature of human beings. Ishmael
notices that when people try to comprehend the ocean they
climb "high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to getastill
better seaward peep" (p. 24). When we hear Father Mapple's
sermon, we find that Jonah has a similar tendency to
attach himself to shrouds. Startled to wakefulness by
his Master, Jonah staggers to his feet and stumbles to
the ship's deck. The first action he takes is to grasp a
shroud: only then does he look at the sea (p. 76). Even
Ahab holds the mizen shroud when looking outwards at sea.
However, for him, the connection brings the look of
crucifixion to his face (p. 170). Even Ahab, in his
terrible isolation, wants at least the semblance of
connection with something outside of himself.

Melville creates an undefined relationship between

the mystical and physical world of rOpe. He has the sooty

flames from the diabolical try-works light up the rigging

84

with its unnatural light (p. 639): he has unearthly
messages appear in the rigging. Melville is alluding to
the message that appeared on the wall of Belshazzar's
palace, a message that foreshadowed the destruction of

the Babylonian kingdom. By having rigging replace wall,
Melville is being consistent with his desire to reconstruct
as fluid a world as possible.

Melville is also toying with psychological pairing
when he connects rOpe to the elusive albatross: Ishmael,
frightened by the quality of whiteness and the uncontroll-
able center of nature, shares his dream-like state with
us:

Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those

clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread,

in which that white phantom sails in all

imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that

spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate,

Nature (pp. 255-6).
Melville, or Ishmael (in this section author and narrator
merge in their omniscience) break the flow of the tale to
give the reader a footnote concerning the albatross'
relationship to rope. Telling the reader of the first
time he saw an albatross, he ends his narrative by
questioning how such a mystic, central, uncontrollable
thing can be caught. He answers his own question:
"Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous

hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea" (p. 256f).

Melville reinforces the power of rope by having even as

85

mysticalabird as the albatross vulnerable to it. And he
creates in all its horrible whiteness, the living embodi-
ment of the rope, the all grasping squid.

Melville also has rope influence dreams. Ishmael
notices that the sailors are protective of one another's
sleep: "If a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle,
the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with
some cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of
disburbing their slumbering shipmates" (p. 172). Ropes
bring nightmares and must be silenced.

Melville sometimes isolates rope to give it power.
In the Parsee's prophesy, hemp alone can kill Ahab (p. 631).
When precious spermacetti is tapped, only a light tackle
called a whip is needed (p. 440). Ahab gives Starbuck
control over his life by handing him a single rope which
he may or may not properly attach to the rigging. If this
single rope is misused, Ahab will fall to his death (p.
677). Melville also reminds his reader that only one rope
is needed to find one's way out of a labyrinth (p. 574).

At times one feels that rope, like the circle, has
a will of its own. It can respond independently of people's
contact with it. When Queequeg and Ishmael are on a
schooner, the Meee, cu: their journey to Nantucket, an
unexpected strain on the main-sail parts the weathersheet.
The tremendous boom flies from side to side, dangerously

sweeping the after part of the deck. The wind and rope

86

seem to be conspiring to punish the Captain and a ram-
bunctious young man for abusing Queequeg. The young man
falls overboard and Queequeg shows his heroism. He whips
hold the rope, secures one end to the bulwarks and flings
the other around the boom, thus stopping all dangerous
motion (p. 95). The rope that might have killed the
bumpkin saves him. Sometimes the rOpe's potential power
is dressed with the calm facade of ineffectuality. During
Ishmael's classification of whales he speaks of the sulphur
bottom whale, mentioning that it is never chased because
it would run away with rope walks of line (p. 159). Rope,
like the circle, has the power of trans-subjectivity: it
shows power independent of that which it is given. When
the rope appears ineffectual, the times it seems to have
acted at will remain in the background. Melville may
overtly concentrate on the rope's innocence, but its
moments of power will not disappear from the montage he
has created.

Different lines have differential power. In the
mat-maker scene, Queequeg and Ishmael are passing and
repassing a two-stranded, tarred rope between the long
yard of a warp. When a sailor shouts that a whale is in
view, their peaceful reverie ends and the lines of weaving
are dropped in order that they may pick up thicker, more

essential rope. The line is also breaking into the

87

peaceful, yet less sturdy circle of transcendence: the
round, fluid, quality of reverie gives way to the more
linear physical reality.

Ropes gain power because of their ability to
connect. In the "Eye-1191.5 Story" when Steelkilt warns
Radney not to threaten him with a hammer and is ignored,
he knocks Radney down and shakes the backstays, gaining
attention from his friends, and thus their aid. After
Steelkilt strikes Radney, three junior mates come to
arrest him, but his friends, because they have received
the message from the ropes, slide down them and arrive
before the mates, allowing Radney to gain the forecastle
(p. 353). ROpes, during a storm, can also connect the
sailors to the rail. Each sailor makes a bowline, and
stays in this loop until the storm subsides. Recall
signals are also tied to the rigging (p. 666). Connection
is also used as punishment: in the Steelkilt/Radney
episode, Steelkilt and his desperados are punished by
being dragged along the deck, like dead cattle and tied
into the mizen rigging (p. 387).

Ropes also gain power because of their sensitivity.
They vibrate in the water and thus become conductors of
life and death when attached to whales. Even the dullest
oarsman feels the power conducted in the line (p. 459).

They are quick to respond to pressure: the instant the

88

stricken whale starts on a fierce run, the line swiftly
straightens (p. 528). Rope can even determine location
(p. 656).

Neither the circle nor the rope will consistently
allow other people control: Ishmael, aware of this, still
attempts to gain as much control as possible. He attempts
to control by defining, spending a good deal of energy
telling his reader how hemp and Manilla differ from each
other. Ishmael's tone, when he tries to discuss rOpe
realistically and physically, is journalistic rather than
poetic:

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the

American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp

as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so

durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more

soft and elastic (p. 368).
Other sailors attempt to control rope by showing it
respect. For instance, when we are first introduced to
the Peguod and told its history, we learn that the masts
on the ship are new, but that the old hempen thews and
tendens have been preserved. The reason for the new masts
is because the ropes were unsuccessful in holding them,
yet they have been saved. A subconscious covenant
between the sailors and the rope may exist: if the sailors
have faith in the experienced rope, perhaps it will aid
them toward a safe journey and return. If such a

covenant does exist, Ahab either consciously or uncon-

sciously breaks it when he forges his new harpoon and

89

demands that the old, although still adequate, towline
be replaced by new rope (p. 621).

Sailors are always trying to work around the
rope's surreptitious power. One way they attempt to do
this is by leaving both ends of the line exposed in each
tub. The lower ends hangs over the edge of the tub
completely disengaged from everything while the higher
end remains open in case the whale begins to move
uncontrollably, or in case more line is needed (p. 369).
But rope proves too chameleon.

Melville allows all the control-oriented fragments
of reality to be subsumed momentarily by the line's power
when he has Ishmael describe what happens when even a
single harpoon is darted:

The harpoon was hurled. 'Stern all!‘ The

oarsman backed water; the same moment

something went hot and hissing along every

one of their wrists. It was the magical

line (p. 376).
When a single harpoon is darted the motion initiates the
flow of line all around the boat; both the speed and
power of the line deny the probability of easy control.
Its power becomes all-consuming, almost taking over the
other fragmented visions of the rOpe. Ishmael offers the
reader an intricate description of smoke jetting up from

the swift turns of the rope around the loggerhead. And

he describes what holding this rope is like: "It was

90

like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade,
and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of
your clutch" (p. 376).

Melville continues to develop the mobile image of
the rope, exploring even more of its facets: it may be
feared for being overly-powerful, but it is also to be
scorned for its weakness. Rope is blamed for not being
able to withstand the strain of people pulling it in
opposite directions. When the sailors refuse to go further
and Ahab insists on going forward, the line breaks, and
is called "treacherous" for doing so (p. 715). The
implication of this name-calling is that the rope, given
its trans-subjective power, could be strong if it somehow
chose. Devil imagery becomes only a fragment of Melville's
development of the rope for he also uses angel imagery in
connection with it: when the line grows tighter, Ishmael
uses the simile of a harpstring to describe it; when Ahab
presses his foot on the rope, he notices that it hums
like a harpstring (p. 621).

By developing the precariousness of the rope's
position in the whale-boat, Melville further adds to the
complexity of our response to it. Melville mentions that
the rigging of the Peguod is attached to whales' teeth
set in rail, thus building on his theme of cannibalism,
and the circularity of existence. The information that

the rope and teeth are juxtaposed is repeated when the

91

Peguod begins its journey. Melville even has the moon's
light shine on these teeth, reinforcing the evil and
danger of the relationship (p. 145). This image reaches
its most powerful height when the captain of the Samuel
Enderly tells his story:

'How it was exactly,‘ continued the one-armed

commander, 'I do not know; but in biting the

line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there

somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that

when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce

we came plump on to his hump!. . .And thinking

the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the

tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have

a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a whale-

line). . .' (p. 560).
Tooth and line fight for supremacy. Captain Boomer
sacrifices an arm in his withdrawal from the conflict.

Rope, connection, may bring safety or death. The

sailors, understandably, have difficulty deciding when to
cut the line and when to hold firm. Melville explores
the danger and joy of connection in a number of scenes.
During the Steelkilt/Radney episode, Steelkilt must make
the decision whether or not to remain attached to Radney:1ua
cuts the rope,severing his attachment to him. Radney
leaves his rope attached to Moby Dick. This rope will get
caught in Moby Dick's teeth and will drown him (p. 343).
In the monkey-rope scene, Queequeg and Ishmael are attached
to one another, but never seriously consider separation.

Ishmael, humorously compares his situation with that of a

dancing ape attached to an Italian organ grinder, yet

92

Ishmael is quite aware that the situation is mortally
dangerous:

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of

my situation then, that while earnestly watching

his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that

my own individuality was now merged in a joint

stock company of two. . .and that another's

mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me

into unmerited disaster and death. . .Nor could

I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only

had the management of one and of it (p. 416).
The decision to remain attached has a more negative affect
during an early chase scene when Queequeg and his boat
succeed in' thrusting their harpoon into a whale and
remain attached even when a violent storm begins. By
remaining attached they risk death. After the squall,
the only sound is that of ropes: "We all heard a faint
creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by the
storm" (p. 301). This eerie sound causes the ropes to
gain the foreground of the montage, and metaphorically
come back to life after the storm. They remind the
reader not only of the power of rope and the rebirth of
life after a storm, but also of the sailors' mortality.

Frequently individuals disagree over when rope

should be cut. During one violent storm, when Ahab's
diabolical harpoon is hit by lightning, its glow frightens
the crew into wanting to reverse direction and return home.

Ahab responds by snatching the harpoon and waving the

burning torch among them, swearing to transfix any sailor

93

that casts loose a rope's end (p. 646). Ahab then demands
more rope, and the men obey. As irrational forces
increase, the rope becomes more vulnerable. Lines can,
and do, rot. In the log and line episode, rain and spray
weaken the rope, making the instrument ultimately in-
effectual. When overstrained, the line will snap. During
a terrible typhoon, Starbuck and Stubb cut the jib and
main-sail adrift as soon as they can. The image that
follows the cutting of the lines is of an albatross losing
feathers. Melville, in creating his intricate montage of
the rope's power, is clearly attempting to keep his image
as large, as complex as possible. Regardless of how the
kaleidoscope turns, however, regardless of how Melville
undermines the image of physical rope, he will not let

the reader forget that the central action of Moby-Dick is

 

taking place on the equator, the non-physical counterpart
of the rope.

Most decisions concerning the physical rope, even
when having generally positive affects, involve pain and
loss (p. 649). One of the central reasons for loss is the
desire for conflicting objects, as well as subjects, to
maintain their power whenever possible. Frequently enemy
and object are irrevocably attached to one another. For
instance, the rope's own flexibility rushes it toward

its potential destroyer, the harpoon.

94

At times the physical line is helpless to human
will; at other times human will is helpless in battling
the physical line. When Starbuck considers tying up Ahab
in order to save the ship, he realizes that Ahab's will
is so much stronger than his own that no amount of physical
rope can aid him:

What! hope to wrest this old man's living power

from his own living hands? Only a fool would

try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all

over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to

ring-bolts on the cabin floor; he would be more

hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not

endure the sight; could not possibly fly his

howling. . . (p. 651).
Ropes may respond to human will. They cannot keep Ahab
fixed; nor can they give Starbuck the strength to try
using them. Yet Melville, on the second day of the chase,
allows rope so much power that its being missing implies
Ahab's death. Ahab tries to maintain control, but Moby
Dick is so ferocious that even he believes that continuing
the battle then is futile: "having no alternative, he
twice sundered the rope near the chocks"(p. 706). His
gesture proves impotent for Moby Dick dashes Stubb's and
Flask's boats togethen. In the chaos which follows the
Parsee becomes entangled in Ahab's line and disappears.
Ahab's response when he finds that the Parsee and his
rope are gone focuses on the missing rope: "'My line! my

line? Gone?-gone?'"(p. 706). He knows that his missing

rope foreshadows his death: Ahab has chosen to fight

95

Moby Dick; the whale-line has chosen to separate itself
from him.

Cutting the physical rope corresponds with meta-
physical problems of connection, and problems of connec-
tion correspond with problems of imbalance. These,in
turn, relate to difficulties in Melville's own life,
specifically to the problem of how to best go about human

relationships. In Moby-Dick Melville explores this net-

 

work of issues more bravely and more honestly than
in his personal life.

Through the objective correlative of the whale
industry Melville studies the issue of balance. When
the members of the Peguod capture a sperm whale and tie
it to one side of the ship, they also catch a right whale
and attach it to the other side of the ship in order to
keep it physically steady, and,even more importantly,
because diabolical Fedellah has suggested that having a
right whale on the opposite side of a sperm whale keeps
ships from capsizing in the future (p. 422). Ishmael
questions this magical cure. Keeping balance, or trying
to do so, is seductive, but this particular method has
its dangers. When both whale heads are tied to the ship,
they obscure the spars and rigging, thus hiding important
ropes. This hiddenness reinforces Stubb's statement that
Fedallah's charm will ultimately "'charm theboat to no

good at last'"(p. 422). Melville, through his character

96

Ishmael, explores the possibility that natural movement,
rather than imposed balance, might be more practical. He
partially makes his suggestion of cutting off both heads
in jest, but there is also seriousness in it:

As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards

the sperm whale's head, now, by counterpoise of

both heads, she regained her even keel; though

sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when

on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over

that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in

Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor

plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming

boat (PP. 425-6).
As in the "Grand Armada" chapter, where Melville, through
his use of break-up,studies the implications of a peaceful
center that cannot hold, so, in his study of rope, he
explores the myriad implications of connectedness.
Melville's physical gestalt of two whales attached to
Opposite ends of the Peguod. gives way to Ishmael's psycho-
logically correspondent question concerning the useful-
ness of studying philosophers. Again Melville has created
a scene only to allow it to disperse; he has concentrated
on one image only to show its limitations.

Again the kaleidoscope shifts, and Melville shows
the life-giving qualities of connectedness. When we meet
the Bachelor, we see a ship carrying two barrels of sperm
wedged in her cask. Easing the load is the suggestion
Ishmael makes; but Melville Offers us another vision:

perhaps we should be attaching ourselves to more life-

giving Objects. But one follows one's nature. Yet, even

97

being as natural as possible has its dangers: during
the "Grand Armada" chapter, an infant whale is caught in
both its umbilical cord and the whale line (p. 489).
Melville, in his study of how best to progress,
becomes confused between his image Of the line and the
circle. The line Offers one set of difficulties, the
circle another. By being attached, Ahab drowns, but by
being separate Pip goes mad. Neither the line nor circle
are consistently life-giving. Melville is exploring these
images, but in his exploration he himself becomes confused
over which to choose. This confusion is best depicted in
his inconsistent choice of a steering mechanism for the
Peguod: its steering apparatus is described both as a
stick and a wheel. Early in the novel Ishmael explains
to the reader that the steering mechanism of the Pequod
is a curiously carved tiller made from the lower jaw Of a
whale. During a critical moment the helmsman who steered
by that lever feels like a Tartar when holding back his
fiery steed by clutching its jaw (p. 106). Yet, in the
midst ofa larger crisis, when Ahab is in a fury, when an
even more critical storm is up, and Ahab pushes the helms-
man aside and attempts to steer the boat himself, he
dashes the helm down before the helmsman can handle the
spokes (p. 374), thus implying that the steering apparatus

is a wheel.

98

This disparity between tiller and wheel, between
line and circle, seems to be more than a simple technical
problem: it is a problem of vision.

As the chase leads the sailors closer to their
destiny, balance and order are more and more frequently
destroyed. Neither circle nor line proves safe. Counter-
balancing attempts are made, such as attaching rope to more
powerful substances like iron and pole rather than sail
and wood, and ropes are braided for increased strength,
but the boats continually capsize and the ropes break.

The sailors become victims of their own inability
to differentiate. Simultaneously, their need for some
semblance of connection becomes stronger. Under the
psychological strain of the second day's chase, Ishmael
needs order desperately, and therefore perceives that
the world is indeed ordered. He sees all things running
into the hull:

. . .as the one ship that held them all; though
it was put together Of all contrasting things --
oak, and maple. . .iron, and pitch, and hemp --
yet all these ran into each other in the one
concrete hull (pp. 700-1).
In this scene, rope gains the foreground, dangerously
becoming part Of the unified vision. By being ignored,
it gains power. The sailors are entering a metaphysical

sphere and Ahab is increasing his own power by allowing

them to become his objects:

99

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the

shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid

to the deck, by the isolated backstays and

halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but

still rapidly was dropped from his perch

(p. 702).
As in a dream, all things begin to move effortlessly.
Unification evokes its opposite. The kaleidoscope turns
and elements begin to terribly, irrevocably, break apart.

Ahab, unsuccessfully, tries to control the
tragedy. He plays out more line and then rapidly hauls
and jerks it in again. The ropes, however, rather than
alleviating the problem, become intricately knotted. The
whale has, by its untraceable evolutions, crossed and
recrossed the three lines attached to him. The boats
have become their own enemies, weaving in such a way as
to make the rope even more convoluted. Line and circle
join once again.

No action is direct: Ahab's desperate attempt to
control his fate brings the reader back to Bulkington,
the sailor who was the first to drown, the sailor who
stepped on land only to return immediately to another
watery voyage. Ishmael, carried away by his own need for
order, had reinforced Bulkington's Obsessive circling,
his direct return to water: "Terrors of the terrible; is
all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, 0

Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray

Of thy ocean-perishing -- straight up, leaps thy

100

apotheosis!" (p. 148). Bulkington had drowned by going
too directly back to water, and Ahab too, in his mono-
maniacal need to revenge himself on Moby Dick,is courting
death. Ahab is so directly identified with the line,
with direct action, that when a rope snaps during the
second to the last day of the chase, he cries out in pain,
"'What breaks in me?'" As he has himself stated earlier,
before he broke the sailors would hear him crack. The
cracking rope represents his own cracking. The kaleido-
scope turns and arrogance becomes pain.

Subject and Object merge and Ahab becomes the rope
the sailors have unsuccessfully controlled. The rope
turns on itself and becomes the noose that hangs Ahab.

The ship's shroud is Ahab's death cloth. Rope, which can
save, has chosen to kill.

Continual circular motion may create a suction to
drown all things, as does the Pequod's spinning at the

end of Moby-Dick. The chase itself has been little more

 

than a mad circle (p. 251), as was the movement in the

"Town Ho's Story," the endless motion of two men, Radney

 

and Steelkilt,around a windlass (pp.329-30). Motion waits
for its end, and the end is often entropy.

Once again the kaleidoscope turns. The same
circle that drowns, that carries the smallest chip of the
Pequod out of sight (p. 722), saves one man, Ishmael, and

one piece of wood, the life-buoy coffin. Ishmael connects

101

himself to this coffin and a passing ship, the Rachel,
rescues him. Line and circle again are intricately
connected, and again, momentarily, the kaleidoscope rests

at yet another still-point.

NOTES -- SECTION II

1Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Fiedelson,
Jr. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964), pp. 487-8.
All subsequent references to this edition will be intern-
ally documented.

 

2Gaston Bachelard, Qe Poetic Imagination and Reverie,
trans. Colette Gaudin (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
1971), PP. 8-9.

 

3Bachelard, p. xix.

4Katharine Kuh, Break-2p: The Core 9: Modern Art
(New York: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1965), pp. 7-8.

5Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle,
trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman i3 collaboration
with the author (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press,
1961), p. vii. It was Georges Poulet who first allowed
me to see how intricately connected the line and circle
were.

 

 

6Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading
efi Mob -Dick (California: University of California Press,
1973 , p. 191.

 

7Yvor Winters, 13 Defense 9: Reason (Denver: Allan
Swallow, 1943), p. 200.

8The Book 9: Daniel, ed. Rev. Dr. A. Cohen (London:
The Soncino Press, I973), pp. 45-6.

9F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 417.

 

10Matthew Arnold, Essays ie Criticism, referred to in
American Renaissance, p. 409.

 

102

SECTION III

AHAB, STARBUCK, AND ISHMAEL:
THE INDIVIDUAL'S SEARCH FOR ORDER

In 1856, five years after the possibility of the
fully-reciprocal relationship Herman Melville had wanted
to achieve with Nathaniel Hawthorne ceased to exist,
Melville was still revealing his hungers to Hawthorne and
Hawthorne was still protectively detached, yet listening
to his anguished cries. Melville visited him in Liverpool
on his way to Constantinople: Hawthorne wrote a journal
entry, revealing Melville's tortured frame of mind:

. . .we took a pretty long walk together, and
sat down in a hollow among the sand hills. . . .
Melville, as he always does, began to reason of
Providence and futurity, endpof everythipgythat
lies égxggdlhuman ken, and informed me that"he
had/Tpretty much”made up his mind to be anni-
hilated;' but still he does not seem to rest in
that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest
until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is
strange how he persists -- and has persisted
ever since I knew him, and probably long before
-- in wandering to and fro over these deserts,
as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid
which we were sitting. He can neither believe,
nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is
too honest and courageous not to try to do one
or the other. If he were a religious man, he
would be one of the most truly religious and
reverential; he has a very high and noble natpre,
and better worth immortality than most of us.

 

This journal entry gives us some insights into Melville.
Although his relationship with Hawthorne had not developed

as he had wished, it had not been replaced.
103

104

Melville could not let go of his relationship with
Hawthorne, even though it was not successful, nor could
he let go of his questions concerning Providence and
futurity.

Melville, in 1851, had not been successful in
forming a fully-reciprocal relationship. He hid this
fact from himself as long as he could. But during the
same period of time, he did successfully explore his own
need for relationships and control of life through the

characters in Moby-Dick. Melville, by studying his

 

characters, explores, rather than reduces, their need

for order; he studies their personalities without
sanctioning their psychological solutions: Ahab's life
ends in self-destruction, as does Starbuck's: neither
active nor passive bargains with fate, neither relation-
ships nor isolation, consistently maintain life. Ishmael
is not saved by the wisdom of rejecting Ahab's vision,
nor by his close, even if not fully-reciprocal relation-
ship to Queequeg, but by serendipity: Ishmael has no
more direct control than any other member of the Pequod's
crew. He is simply lucky enough, or fated, to be at the
center Of the vortex with Queequeg's life-buoy; he is
simply lucky enough, or fated, to be spotted by the Rachel

as it searches for its lost son.

105

Robert Zoellner, in his stimulating study Of

Mopy-Dick,suggests that we connect Ishmael's movement

 

away from solipsism with his survival:

This seamless unity of perceiver and perceived,
of the outer world and the inner, sets Ishmael
apart from Ahab. This is what will save
Ishmael while Ahab goes down to destruction:
his sense of oneness, increasing radically as
Moby-Dick progresses, with the external world.2

 

Zoellner stresses, in his study of Ishmael, that Ishmael's
depression lifts as the novel progresses. He relates this
change to Ishmael's movement from the cold Of New England
to the warmth of the Pacific, and from the dark philosophy
with which Ahab enmeshes him to his disentanglement from
this dark vision and its replacement by the peace of
brotherhood. This is understandable. But when Zoellner
connects Ishmael's positive feelings about himself and his
world to his survival,3 one must question Zoellner's theory:
Ishmael, landing in the middle Of the Pacific Ocean, can
clearly have no power over his survival: no amount of
Optimism can save a person from drowning.

What Zoellner is trying to do makes emotional sense:
he is trying to pair survival with a positive, mature,
sense of the world, but this reflects Zoellner's desire,
more than Melville's presentation. Melville, by ending

Moby-Dick as he does, seems to be consciously attempting

 

to study all types of human solutions without sanctioning

any. If he wanted to raise Ishmael's philosophy above

106

the other philosophies presented, he would have Ishmael
survive, not by chance, but by his own actions. Melville

clearly does not do this: in Moby-Dick, Melville is

 

avoiding his tendency to judge. His characters may do so,
but they are not Melville.

Although Melville does not sanction any solution,
one can learn much about him by the type of characters he
is creating, and the type of problems on which he focuses.
In this study, I would like to concentrate on three of
his main characters: Ahab, Starbuck,and Ishmael. All
three of these characters are, like Queequeg, creatures
in a transition state -- neither caterpillar, nor butter-
fly. Melville studies them, as he studies the line and
circle, attempting to show us their various parts, their
points of activity and passivity, and their relationships
to one another.

Through his character Ahab, Melyille studied his
own tendency toward an absolute solution, toward a
solution which used people as objects in order to gain
fuller control over the desired aspects in oneself:

simplified intensity and direOtediaction.

, H.

‘....
”L

'MMMuch of Ahab's strength comes from a fear of being
nothing more than a ploy in someone else's game. Some-
times his need for invulnerability becomes so strong that
he acts irrationally, refusing to be even afraid of human

diseases. He will not allow himself to feel his fear of

107

mortality, and thus the Jeraboam's epidemic cannot

 

threaten him.4 And even when the ship's log and line are
clearly rotten and cannot possibly function properly and
give directional information, he insists that the instru-
ment will hold upon his demand (p. 657). He refuses to
be frightened of the corposants when they light up the
rigging and practically sing of physical as well as meta-
physical danger, insisting that they are useful and have
appeared for positive reasons: to light the crew's way
toward Moby Dick (p. 641). And he shows anger when
nature will not act according to his rigid value structure:
a structure which allows no weakness, no withdrawal. He
condemns the wind for not fighting back: "'Ha! a coward
wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to
receive a single blow'" (p. 710). The wind partially
redeems itself by following Ahab's rules and blowing
"straight on," but Ahab maintains some condemnatory
feelings concerning it.

Through Ahab, Melville also explores the individual's
need to get past the world's mask, to find the center of the
univéfse, and thus to understand the meaning of the world.
Melville allows him the compulsive courage to act out his
need for control, even at the cost of his life. Ahab is
more afraid of being nothing than of being dead. This
need of strength transforms itself into a deep fear of

weakness. If Ahab gives way to any of his inner

108

softness, if Ahab shows any movement away from the direct
path of his quest, he is convinced that he will lose his
battle with the elements,and never find the answer for
which he searches. Ishmael describes his supra-human
strength, even in the fact of human misery, when the
captain of the Rachel begs Ahab to change his course for
a short time and help him search for his missing son:
"Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock,
but without the least quivering of his own" (p. 670).

If Ahab is to be victor, he will only identify
with victors. His rejection of the sun points toward
this fear of failure. If the sun is not omnipotent, then
Ahab will have as little to do with it as possible. Ahab,
viewing the dead whale's tendency to float away from the
sun, generalizes the meaning of this act; he sees the sun
as limited and therefore unworthy of his respect: "'life
dies sunward full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than
death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other
way'" (p. 629). Ahab will not even allow death half the
power; his turning from the sun implies that death may,
as far as he is concerned,have all the power since it has
the last power. He hails death, personified as the watery
world, as victor: "'Then hail, for ever hail, 0 sea, in
whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest.

Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and

109

valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!'"
(p. 630).

By fighting the White Whale, Ahab attempts to
simplify his goal,fa goal which he realizes is symbolic
ratheggphanwactual. By wreaking hate on the White Whale,
he is symbolically fighting for the control of his own
life:

/'

'All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard
masks. But in each event -- in the living act,
the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings
of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
If man will strike, strike through the mask!
. How can the prisoner reach outside except by
thrusting through the wall? To me, the white
whale is that wall, shoved near to me. . . .
and be the white whale agent, or be the white
whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him' (p. 220-1).
Ahab's goal is simple: he will fight the White
Whale's outrageous strength, meeting what he perceives
as the whale's inscrutable malice with every muscle and
nerve of his being. His fight for revenge is the only
part of him that remains unviolated. Nevertheless, this
core self satisfies him. He tells his crew: "'Ahab is
enough to die'" (p. 716), and he tells them that regard-
less of what takes place, his center is invulnerable:
"'Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as
graze Old Ahab in his own proper and unaccessible being'"
(p. 705). He believes that his outward being, his mask,

may be flawed, limited, lacking the low perception,

110

emotional, physically razed, but he never believes himself
unworthy of returning to his spiritual source.

Ahab's indomitable will fascinates Ishmael as well
as other members of the crew. His passionate isolation
invites theorizing. Left an orphan at one year, Ahab
refrains from marrying until later in life. The woman
he weds is much younger than he. Shortly after she
becomes pregnant, he leaves her (p. 120), continuing his
own isolation, and making his child almost as orphaned as
be.

A scar extending across his crown, face,and neck
(p. 169), also separates him from general humanity. The
scar becomes a generating center for rumors: some think
it extends across his entire body. The Manxman suggests
that it may have been acquired during a battle with the
elements; the carpenter is so caught up in the scar that,
in an attempt to understand Ahab's behavior, he uncon-
sciously evokes the memory Of the scar:

'He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls
come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that
the Isle of Albermarle, one of the Gallipagos,
is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems
to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too,
right in his middle. He's always under the Line
-- fiery hot, I tell ye!'(p. 666).

When Ahab is crippled by Moby Dick, he further

secludes himself. Rumors concerning him become increas-

ingly metaphysical. Frequently, they associate him with

111

the dead. Ishmael summarizes the rumors: ". . .for a
certain period, both before and after the sailing of the
Pequod, he had hidden himself away with Grand-Lama-like
exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speech-
less refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the
dead" (p. 591). The different echoes of his legs increase
this sense of mysterious otherworldliness: "While his
one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every
stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On
life and death this old man walked" (p. 310).

What most intrigues Ishmael about Ahab is the
depth of his intensity. Ishmael associates the center of
this intensity with the same omnipotent blankness as Moby
Dick (p. 272). At times this blankness connects Ahab to
God; at times to the devil. On one hand Ishmael verbal-
izes that he looked like a man cut away from the stake
(p. 168) and that his trances and torments left him with
Christomachia (p. 271), and that his cabin was a sacred
retreat (p. 167); but on the other hand he sees God as
Ahab's enemy. Ishmael hears a hiss when Ahab tosses his
pipe into the water (p. 176), a sound which connects Ahab
to the devil. When a sea-gull steals the hat which hides
half of Ahab's face from him, Ishmael associates the

bird's gesture with God's wrath.

112

Ahab is aware that his fellow sailors have
mythicized him and he uses their response to augment his
power over them. He refers to himself as "Old Thunder"
(p. 638) in an attempt to reinforce in others their
existing sense of his elemental power. He also uses his
silence to gain control, assuming the role of a "mute,
maned sea-lion" (p. 202) during mealtimes.

Knowing his crew is superstitious, he uses ritual
to deepen their commitment to the hunt. He gathers the
crew, ordering the mates to cross lances. He grasps the
center of each harpoon, forming the mystical, six pointed,
Star of David, the star of victorious warfare. Ahab then
orders the harpooneersto detach and draw their harpoons,
completing the ceremony by filling each harpoon socket
with the same fiery liquid that the crew is to consume,
unifying their commitment to Ahab's quest through both
weapon and person (p. 224). He attempts to convince the
crew that they will the chase.

Later in the voyage he again uses superstition to
gain power. When a heavy gale lights the rigging with
fire, he ends the crew's half-mutinous stirrings by
demonstrating his mystical acumen: he uses the power of
correspondence to convince the members of the Pequod that
he, by blowing out the harpoon's flames, has successfully
blown out their last fear (p. 664). When the compasses

go awry, he responds in a similar fashion, making his

113

scientific knowledge appear otherworldly, making his
reorientation of the loadstone seem magical. He calls
himself lord of the loadstone, and relies on the crew's
ignorance to gain awesome respect when he cries: "'I
crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and
now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend
all'" (p. 658), each sailor silently acquiesces.

Ahab's actions are deliberate and methodical. He
spends hours discovering and charting hypothetical
patterns of Moby Dick's movement through the world. Ahab
carefully chooses which of the crew's expectations to
violate. His purpose is to tie them, in any way he can,
to his hunt. Although he would like to believe, and some-
times almost completely convinces himself, that he is a
cogged wheel that fits into all his crew's various wheels,
that he is a match and they so many ant-hills of explosives
(p. 226), that his own soul is a centipede that cannot be
cut down (p. 707), Ahab still attempts not to jeopardize
his position by overtesting it. He uses his rhetoric as
much to convince himself, as to convince his crew, that
his power is undefeatable: "'The path to my fixed purpose
is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of

mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!

114

Naught's an Obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!'"
(p. 227).

Ahab needs to repeatedly convince himself that
his actions have led him so far that he can never return.
His tendency is to make his world as stable as possible
and thus gain the added strength of consistency. He does
this in terms of the hunt; he also does it in terms of
his deplorable scar. Hating it, he simplifies the matter
in his own mind, by convincing himself that it is unremov-
able. On one level he will ask the blacksmith tO smooth
out his scar, but he will not wait for an answer, feeling
more comfortable in asserting that the task he himself
requests is an impossible one: "'. . .can ye smooth out
a seam like this, blacksmith. . .if thou could'st, black-
smith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil,
and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes'" (p. 619).
Ahab responds before the blacksmith, asserting that the
scar is permanent having worked its way to bone.

Through Ahab, Melville was recreating his own
need for answers, and his unwillingness to listen completely
to responses because somehow they might not work to make
his world what he desires. During the letter he wrote to

Hawthorne which thanked him for his response to Moby-Dick

 

and asked him not to review the book, Melville was showing

115

the same tendency as Ahab to leave his version of reality
as untouched by other's views as possible.5 Through Ahab,
Melville indirectly explored the dangers of fearing
reality.

Melville intricately tied Ahab's bravery to his
insecurity. The major outlet he allowed Ahab for venting
this insecurity was in his limited relationships with
other members of the Pequod. If he is to move unswervingly
toward his battle with Moby Dick, he will have to control
his feelings Of self-hate, of human morality,and of human
love. His three major relationships, ones with Fedallah,
Starbuck, and Pip, serve Ahab as a means through which he
can maintain the necessary control to continue his quest.

Ahab uses Fedallah to vent his feelings of evil
and self-hate. He allows Fedallah to mercilessly accuse
him of weakness and to torment him with prophesies of
destruction so that he can justify this hatred. Fedallah
is most essential to Ahab when he feels his own control
diminishing. When Ahab becomes increasingly clearer that
he will not be dissuaded from the hunt, Fedellah is reduced
to a tremulous shadow (p. 675).

The crew is useful in helping Ahab maintain his
evil as a separate entity from himself. They are more
comfortable believing that Fedallah, rather than their
captain, is linked with deviltry. Ahab is allowed his

humanities by the crew (p. 120), but Fedallah is not. The

116

members of the crew see Fedallah as physically devilish:
they see his complexion as tiger-yellow (p. 290) and hear
his voice as a snake-like hiss. Stubb develops a myth
around him: "'Why, they say as how he went a sauntering
into the old flag-ship once, switching his tail about
devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old
governor was at home'" (p. 423). Earlier, Flask notices
that his tusk was carved into a snake's head (p. 422).

He believes that Fedallah, like the devil, needs oakum to
stuff into the toes of his boots, and that he tucks his
tail surreptitiously out of sight.

Ishmael also sees Ahab and Fedallah as unaccount-
ably connected. When Fedallah leans over the same'rail
as Ahab, Ahab seems to allow him to occupy his shadow.
Ishmael is alluding to the fact that Fedallah, like the
devil, casts no shadow, but he is also suggesting that an
intricate tie exists between the two men. At times
Ishmael actually questions Fedallah's physical existence:
" . . .if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed
only to blend with and lengthen Ahab's" (p. 426). On the
second day of the chase Ishmael reports another corre-
spondence betweenAhab'sand Fedallah's existences: "As with
Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly

clinging to his boat's broken half, which afforded a

comparatively easy float. . ." (pp. 704-5).

117

Fedallah accepts his two-dimensional position on
board the Peguod. He demands no more than the symbolic
position allotted to him by the members of the Peguod.

When Ahab and Perth forge Ahab's harpoon, the harpoon that
is to kill Moby Dick, Fedallah passes the fire silently,
invoking some curse or blessing on the toil (p. 620); when
Ahab breaks the quadrant, Ishmael interprets the Parsee's
response as triumphant, fatalistic, self-consuming despair
(p. 634). Fedallah, willingly, reinforces Ahab's self-
destructive movements and willingly parallels them. For

a reason which is never developed in Moby-Dick, he

 

patiently and consistently awaits Ahab's death, and his
own. On the first day of the hunt, Fedallah "incuriously
and mildly" eyes Ahab when he is tossed from his boat,
and his head, like a fragile bubble, rides the ocean.
Even when the whale shakes the boat, Fedallah's eyes remain
unastonished.

As Fedallah prophesies, he dies before Ahab,
serving as his pilot. And Ahab wants and needs this pilot:
a pilot that he can hate, a pilot that represents that which
will lead him to death. Ahab could hide the pale death
glimmer in his own eyes by viewing it in Fedallah's; and
he could protect himself from the hideous motion of his own
gnawing anguish by watching it reflected in the motion of
Fedallah's mouth (p. 689). To see these things too directly

in himself might discourage him from continuing the hunt.

118

In as much as Fedallah can personify pure evil, pure
vindictiveness, and in as much as he heads Ahab's boat,
then he must also rule Ahab's revenge and lead lrhn to the
enactment of his revenge. Ahab needs them to act as one
man. If Fedallah and he are identical, then he will
assuredly revenge himself upon Moby Dick: if Fedallah

and he are identical, then Ahab can indeed be self-
sufficient. Ahab fluctuates betewen dividing himself from
Fedallah in order to vent his scorn of so cruel a being,
and uniting himself with Fedallah to assure his vindic-
tive victory. Through the Ahab/Fedallah relationship
Melville is exploring how a relationship can be used to
intensify purpose and yet to diminish life and decrease
honest self-exploration.

Perhaps even more strongly, Ahab needs his
relationship with Starbuck in order to project his moral
nature, a nature which would make his monomaniacal hunt
for the white whale an inhuman one to carry out. If he
cannot exorcise his moral component, he cannot subordinate
all the live's on board the Pequod to his need to strike
through a mask, which when explored may reveal nothing to
him. By projecting his own need to be good into Starbuck,
Ahab can simultaneously rule and pity his own moral nature.
He controls the part of him that wants to stop himself
from completing his hunt by giving it over to Starbuck.

He will let Starbuck prevent the quest he refuses to st0p

119

himself. Again and again, he actively gives Starbuck
opportunities to destroy him: when entering the basket
which will allow him to get to a high point in the main-
mast, he gives Starbuck the essential rope, which, if
tied improperly, will cause him to fall to his death. He
is aware of the implications of this gesture: "'Take the
rope, sir -- I give it into thy hands, Starbuck'" (p. 677).
Starbuck, his projected moral force, will be the perfect
agent to his death. But Starbuck, for reasons I will
discuss later, cannot find the strength to be less than
perfect, or to kill what he himself idealizes,even though
he is convinced that Ahab will bring death to the entire
crew.

Ahab makes Starbuck the enemy, the moral force
that will stop him, if it can, from fighting the inscrut-
able White Whale. In order to separate himself from
Starbuck, in order to destroy his desire to emphathize,
he gloats over the power his successfully vindictive self
has over Starbuck. He compulsively needs to prove this
power again and again. It is Starbuck he needs to command;
it is Starbuck whom he orders to send the men on deck so
that they can swear their loyalty to his chase; and it is
Starbuck whom be publicly challenges to refuse the chase.
He tells Starbuck, partially in order to convince himself:

"'Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling

120

cannot, Starbuck!'" (p. 222). Ahab needs to prove to
Starbuck, and thus to himself, that rightmindedness, that
humanistic virtue, is incompetent to stop his quest.
Starbuck is the only member of the crew on whom he draws
his musket (p. 605).
At times Ahab will use omens to gain power, but

he is afraid of Starbuck's mystical fears and works, and
tries as much as he can to deny these tendencies in him-
self. When Starbuck responds to the first day's chase as
a heavenly gesture telling the members of the Peguod that
they might still turn around and be saved, Ahab denies the
omens and denies the fact that Starbuck's fears are his
own repressed fears:

'Omen? omen? -- the dictionary! If the gods

think to speak outright to man, they will

honorably speak outright; not shake their heads,

and give an Old wive's darkling hint.-- Begone!

Ye two are the Opposite poles of one thing;

Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck;

and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone

among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods

nor men his neighbors!‘ (p. 697).
In order to distance Starbuck's moralizing and mythicizing
from himself, he tries to relate him as much as possible
to Stubb, a man with whom he does not identify. Ahab also
attempts to remove himself from the shadowy sphere Of human
behavior. People become frightened; people give up their

purpose. Ahab is separate and he alone will be successful.

He hates Starbuck's judgments and fears because they

121

remind him too much of his own repressed morality, a
morality that he cannot perfectly delete from his nature.
Starbuck also represents the part of Ahab which
is capable of pity. Ahab fights this kind of pity in him-
self because he knows it will impede his ability to act.
Starbuck is that repressed part of him that can blasphe-
mously Obey rebelling in order not to kill the vindictive
Ahab, even though the vindictive Ahab can surely kill him.
Yet there are times when Ahab so hungers for

this repressed morality that he turns to Starbuck,
revealing his pain, needing Starbuck's empathy, yet thank-
ful that Starbuck cannot find the strength to stop him:

'Forty years of continual whaling! forty years

of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty

years on the pitiless sea!. . .and then, the

madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the

smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings

old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey

-- more a demon than a man! -- aye, aye! what a

forty years' fool -- fool -- old fool, has old

Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase?‘

(pp. 683-4).
Ahab cannot stand Starbuck's stare, for it is Ahab's
morality staring at his vindictive, compulsive self. Ahab
demands that Starbuck redirect his focus: "'Take off
thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a
doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my
heat has melted thee to anger-glow'" (p. 221). Triumphant,

the vindictive Ahab feels compelled to punish his receptive

self. Ahab is fighting Ahab.

122

As he approaches his destiny and his vindictive
part gains strength, he is able to comfortably look into
Starbuck's eyes without feeling threatened. He fantasizes
his wife and child in their magic glass (p. 684). The
vision is bittersweet because Ahab realizes his inability
to nurture these people. The most he can allow Starbuck
is the Opportunity to stay aboard the Pequod during the
chase.

Ahab does not nurture Starbuck, his wife or child,
because he is afraid nurturing these people will interfere
with his vindictive quest. But as he approaches Moby
Dick his strong need for vindictive power invokes its
opposite: a need to be loved and loving. Pip becomes
the outlet for these emotions. The relationship is limited
but genuine. When the Manxman repremands Pip, Ahab comes
to his rescue: "'The greater idiot ever scolds the
lesser. . . .Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest
thou Pip was, boy?'" (p. 659). As heartless as he can be
toward himself, he can still allow himself to act
compassionately toward Pip.

It is interesting that Ahab cannot see his own
reflection in Pip's eye (p. 659). This is directly
connected to his ability to care for him. When Ahab
consciously identifies things and people with himself,

he feels compulsively bound to hate them. He punishes

123

others as he punishes himself. This hardness toward self
and toward that with which he identifies, appears most
clearly when Starbuck requests that the leaking casks be
mended. Ahab screams:

'Begone! Let it leak! I'm all aleak myself.

Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky

casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky

ship; and that's a far worse plight than the

Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my

leak. . .' (PP. 603-4).
Because Ahab identifies the casks with himself he refuses
to repair them. He can only be kind to Pip by keeping
him as separate from himself as possible. But uncon-
sciously, Ahab is identifying with Pip. Pip is that part
of him that is miserable, that part which has been
defeated by his desire to break through the pasteboard
mask. As heartless as he can be to himself, he can act
compassionately toward Pip. He is unaware of the irony
in his cry for compassion: "'There can be no hearts above
the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here.
Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him,
ye creative libertines'" (p. 659). Ahab is indirectly
nurturing his own deserted child-like self. When he opens
up his cabin to give Pip a home, he is doing for Pip what
he cannot do for himself or for those who threaten the
hunt of Moby Dick.

Pip is grateful for Ahab's love, and will go

through any pain to keep it. He responds masochistically

124

to Ahab's preoccupation with his hunt: "'I am indeed
down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I'll stay,
though this stern strikes rocks, and they bulge through:
and oysters come to join me'" (p. 673). Ahab can continue
to walk on deck: Pip passively accepts whatever abuse or
love he is given.

Ahab remains equally obsessed with the chase.

Only in as much as he is clear that Pip cannot interfere
with his need for vengeance, can the relationship continue.
As long as Pip does not threaten the chase, Ahab can
maintain his relationship: "'Now, then, Pip, we'll talk
this over: I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!'"
(p. 667). When the chase begins.Pip is forgotten. Ahab
uses him as a distraction, as an outlet for troublesome
positive emotions which cannot successfully be cut out;

he discards him when there is no time left for love.

Ahab has gained much of his strength by using
other people as a means by which to limit and strengthen
his own active personality. At times he remembers that
he has cut out much of what is good in him. When shoals
of small fish - a good luck omen - swim away from him, he
responds: "'Swim away from me, do ye?'" (p. 315). Ishmael
notices his deep sadness: "There seemed but little in the
words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness

than the insane man had ever before evinced" (p. 315).

125

Yet he is willing to accept his losses in order to wreak
his hate upon the White Whale.

Ahab would have preferred being without fear, yet
as deeply as he desires to repress it, he cannot. When
he realizes that Fedallah's prophesy is being enacted, he
responds by denying his own place in that prophesy. Ahab
states emphatically that the Parsee prophesied correctly
for himself, but incorrectly for Ahab (p. 712). When he
is not able to distance himself from these fears or deny
them, he can feel them so deeply that he gets past them
quickly:

Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood shot,
blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his
wrinkles: the long tension of Ahab's bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded
to his body's doom; for a time, lying all
crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like
one trodden under foot of herds of elephants.
Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of this physical

prostration did but so much the more abbreviate

it (pp. 694-5) .
Ahab attempts to maintain his firmness. When he breaks
he breaks completely, only to heal the faster and once
again prove his need to be strong.

As he nears his own death, he grows afraid.
Although he himself crushes the quadrant, when he sees
it lying on the deck he identifies himself with it:

"'Thou poor, proud, heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yester-

day I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feign

126

have wrecked me'"(p. 655). Although he prefers to think
of himself as a man who already experienced death, and
who is therefore invulnerable to it, part of him realizes
that he too will be broken.

Ahab's core self, the part of him that knows he
is neither all good nor all evil, all vulnerable or all
invulnerable, is a sensitive, astute, philosophical man,
yet one who is determined to separate himself from the
majority of men simply born to die. He sees the world
as a circle, but the circle offends him and he insists on
at least trying to break through it. He convinces him-
self that if he responds to the world as if it were simple,
as if he were simple, then his chance of breaking through
the world's wall will be much better. Part of Ahab is
aware of his own ironic position, but he refuses to act
on this knowledge. Ishmael perceives this awareness in
Ahab during the "Grand Armada" chapter:

And when he glanced upon the green walls of the
watery defile in which the ship was then sailing,
and bethought him that through that gate lay the
route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that
through that same gate he was now both chasing
and being chased to his deadly end; and not only
that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and
inhuman atheistical devils were infernally
cheering him on with their curses; -- when all
these conceits had passed through his brain,
Ahab's brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the
black sand beach after some storm tide had been

gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm
thing from its place (pp. 491-2).

127

Realizing that he is also a victim, Ahab still insists
on acting out his role as victimizer and revenging him-
self on Moby Dick.

While Ahab can intellectually agree that some things
are better off discarded than pursued, he will not act
on this knowledge. As he says to the captain of the

Samuel Enderby: "'What is best let alone, that accursed

 

thing is not always what least allures'" (p. 564). Ahab
attempts to stay with his decision to fight Moby Dick,
regardless of the fact that he knows he is naming an
inscrutable thing and then fighting it for the very name
he has himself given it (p. 221), just as he continues

to complete the forging of his own harpoon, even after he
questions whether he is simply forging his own branding
iron (p. 621). Intellectually, Ahab knows he is part of
a larger scheme, and that he, as part, cannot always
comprehend the whole. But Ahab wants to stay with his
decision to break through the wall: if the Iron Crown of
Lombardy is too heavy, if the jagged edges gall him, if
his brain seems to beat against the solid metal, still,
he will wear it until death (pp. 225-6). Vulnerable as
he is, Ahab insists upon meeting Moby Dick head on until
he has either thrust through his inscrutableness, or died

in the process of trying.

128

Ahab can accept that the dead, blind wall butts
all inquiring heads, but he will only intellectualize
this information. He verbalizes his need to act in spite
of the fact that his reason condemns such action: "'I
leave a white and turbid wake; pale water, paler cheeks
where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to
whelm my track; let them; but first I pass'" (p. 225).
He accepts the fact that he is tied up and twisted,
gnarled and knotted with wrinkles (p. 682), and that
there is pain in fighting nature, but he will not give up
his quest: "'Born in throes, 't is fit that man should
live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then!'" (p. 551).
Ahab knows that his world is an extension of him-
self, that what he is indirectly fighting is his own
inscrutableness, but this knowledge does not lessen his
need to break through it. He verbalizes this when he
analyzes the doubloon on the mainmast:
'There's something ever egotistical in mountain—
tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty
things; look here -- three peaks as proud as
Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the
courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl,
that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab, and this round
gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which,
like a magicians glass, to each and every man in
turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self'

Ahab also knows that he is acting out of passion and that

his philosophical stance is circular. If he is every part,

then he is the heaven by which he feels turned, and he is

129

Fate acting upon him (p. 685). He is the destroyer and
the destroyed, responding to himself by defying himself.
When Ahab looks at the quadrant he has just destroyed,
one sees his identification with it:

'Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty

Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains: the

world brags of thee, of thy cunning and

might; but what after all canst thou do, but

tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thy-

self happenest to be on this wide planet, and

the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot

more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of

water or one grain of sand will be tomorrow

noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insult-

est the sun!‘ (pp. 633-4).
Through the mutilated image of the quadrant, power and
powerlessness meet. Ahab, like Melville, is aware of the
still-point at the center of both line and circle. At
the end, he too will be at this identical point as
vanquished and vanquisher and as the creator of both. The
knowledge that he, like the most poisonous reptile of the
marsh, and like the sweetest songster of the grove, will
do nothing more or less than inevitably beget his like,
gives him both pain and power: "'I own thy speechless,
placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me;
nor do I now drop these links'" (p. 642).

If Ahab will do anything, he, being Fate, will

fulfil his destiny. Whatever he does, his philosophy

acknowledges that he will be himself. If his worship is

defiance then it is the correct form of worship for him.

130

His patterning, his cotillion, is the correct dance:
"'Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm
waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue.
The diver sun -- slow dived from noon, -- goes down; my
soul mounts up!'" (p. 225).

Ahab also knows that the more he chases the
shadow of himself, the more it will elude him, but his
need to chase is part of his destiny. Ahab, like
Narcissus, will only be able to rest when he touches the
still-point, even if that touching will mean that he must
drown at the bottom of a pool: ". . .Ahab leaned over
the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank
and sank to his gaze, the more and more that he strove to
piercethe profundity" (p. 682).

Knowing his destiny is self—destructive, Ahab
sometimes wishes he could be someone else. When he asks
the blacksmith to make a complete man after a desirable
pattern, he models this man after what he finds lacking
in himself:

'. . .I'll order a complete man after a desirable
pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks;
then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel;. . .
three feet through the wrist; no heart at all,
brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of
fine brains -- and let me see -- shall I order
eyes to see outwards? No, put a sky-light on top
of his head to illuminate inwards' (p. 599).

What Ahab is not able to separate from himself in life,

he can delete in fantasy. The complete man he depicts

131

will know no confusion, he will only reason, and will
never have to contend with conflicting emotions. He will
never feel compelled, as Ahab does, to take a small vial
of sand out of his pocket and long for the soundings of
home (p. 628). Unlike Ahab, he will need no box in which
to keep his sins tightly bound.

But Ahab is not this emotionless ideal. He chooses
to act only out of his need for control, for revenge, but
repress his other needs as he tries, he cannot perfectly
annihilate them. He can pack his sins and his needs in
separate compartments, he can use various relationships
to help him maintain control, but he cannot force his
emotional needs to eternally dissipate. Part of Ahab
always questions his ruthless need for vengeance:

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly

thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and

master and cruel, remorseless emperor commands

me; that against all natural lovings and longings,

I so keep pushing and crowding, and jamming my-

self on all the time; recklessly making me ready

to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst

not so much as dare? (p. 685).
Ahab may stubbornly fight against the wind (p. 627), and
even though his actions are simple, his spirit is not.
Melville,through Ahab, has successfully explored a mono-
maniacal personality without reducing it. Ahab may stop
supping, praying, going beneath the planks, but he will

neither stOp acting nor feeling. He fights and thinks

until he is caught around the neck by the flying turns of

132

his own harpoon, actively fighting his way toward the
passivity of death.

Ahab's destruction becomes part of his own self-
fulfilling prophesy of doom. He has wanted to be prophet
and fulfiller (p. 227), and is his belief in entropy and
his obsessive movement toward it, he successfully fulfils
both roles. He has cried: "'Hand me those main-masts
links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine
beat against it; blood against fire!'" (p. 641). The full
prive had been demanded. . .and it had been paid.

Through Starbuck, Melville explores the dangers
of passivity and the dangers of ignoring the cannibalism
of the world. While Ahab tries to streamline his
personality to be only active and revengeful, Starbuck,
his psychological opposite, attempts to be only receptive
and understanding, except in fulfilling specific obliga-
tions as chief-mate. When placed in a position where
action is essential, unless the activity relates directly
to the whaling industry, Starbuck finds himself unable or
unwilling to act. Starbuck's need to relinquish power
comes from the same psychological space as Ahab's need to
maintain it: both men wanted idealized worlds. While
Ahab's personal philosophy centers around the belief that
"I must provide," Starbuck's centers around the belief

that "God must provide." As Ahab uses Fedallah, Starbuck,

133

and Pip to narrowly control the elements in his own
personality, so Starbuck is able to deny the assertiveness
in his own personality by centering this trait in Ahab

and protecting him for owning the very characteristic he
will have nothing to do with in himself.

Ishamel chances upon the very appropriate image
of a mummy in his attempt to define Starbuck's nature.
The image is especially apt because it elicits in the
reader an impression of Starbuck's passivity. On the
surface, Starbuck seems a young, aggressive whaleman,
yet there in an aura of stasis surrounding him. Ishmael
describes him: ". . .Starbuck seemed prepared to endure
for long ages to come, and to endure always as now; for
be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer,
his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all
climates" (p. 158). This mechanical case combines with
an element of dryness in his character, suggesting to
Ishmael the quality of "twice baked" hardness. Without
being fully conscious of it, Ishmael's imagery implies
his sense that Starbuck's strength is precarious and
that given the wrong circumstances, Starbuck will crumble
to dust. Although Starbuck's thinness "seemed no more
the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed
the indication of any bodily blight" (p. 157), Ishmael's

language suggests that the "condensation" of the man who,

134

on one hand, seems made to endure, on the other hand, is
likely to evaporate. The fact that he seems born in some
drought or famine adds to this sense of contradiction,
this sense of death preserved in life.

Further testimony of Starbuck's imbalance and the
sense that something in his personality is being rigidly
held back is the fact that Ishmael, rather than finding
him good looking finds him "by no means ill-looking."
Ishmael also tells the reader that Starbuck is "embalmed
with inner health," subtly connecting this vital attribute
of health with the contradictory image of death.

Thus, from our earliest introduction to Starbuck,
the reader gets a Yeatsian sense that the "center will not
hold." There is something in Starbuck which is too
technically perfect to be alive. Even the rigger's
definition of him as a "lively" mate, both "good" and
"pious" (p. 142), suggests the awkward, opposing combina-
tion of health and rigidity: there is a dense quality to
the word pious. that renders false either itself or the
word lively.

Ishmael is consciously aware of some elements of
contradiction in Starbuck's personality. He sees him as
a man bent in discordant directions:

Outward portents and inward presentiments were
his. And if at times these things bent the

welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-
away domestic memories of his young Cape wife

135

and child, tend to bend him still more from the

original ruggedness of his nature, and open him

still further to those latent influences which,

in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of

dare—devil daring, so often evinced by others in

the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery"

(p. 158).
Although aware of the contradiction, Ishmael fails to
understand how Starbuck can be brave in the hunt yet
easily discouraged by abstractions. Ishmael is fascinated
by this limited, yet powerful bravery:

And brave as he might be, it was that sort of

bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men,

which, while generally abiding firm in the

conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or

any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the

world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific,

because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes

menace you from the concentrating brow of an

enraged and mighty man (p. 159).
Ishmael, failing to understand,can still successfully
diagnose Starbuck's nature. Although Ishmael never
verbalizes that Starbuck is acting out of an incomplete,
idealized center, he does conclude that Starbuck's
behavior reflects incompetence, the incompetence of "mere
unaided virtue or right-mindedness" (p. 251). Ishmael
perceives that it is not enough to be passively good, for
passivity will ultimately become complicity with evil.
If right-mindedness cannot defend itself, then it is self-
destructive.

Starbuck's desire to be simply pure in a world

that does not allow for such clear virtue renders him

136

impotent in the face of destructive power. Karen Horney,
humanistic psychologist, defines the perfectionist
personality as having the following characteristics:

This type feels superior because of his high

standards, moral and intellectual, and on this

basis looks down on others. His arrogant

contempt for others, though, is hidden -- from

himself as well. . .because his ver standards

prohibit such 'irregular' feelings.
Starbuck is not in touch with the fact that he feels
superior to the other sailors. Yet he forms no close
relationships, never considering his isolation inappro-
priate. Ahab is the one person toward whom he shows any
personal interest. Starbuck feels compelled to be
virtuous at all costs, and it is this relationship with
Ahab which forms the center of conflict: Starbuck cannot
be pure if he kills rather than understands Ahab, nor
can be be pure if he fails to kill Ahab and thus allows
him to destroy the entire crew.

Starbuck portrays his need to be perfect in several
ways. One way is by feeling compelled to see all of life's
horrors as outside himself. Hearing the revelry in the
forecastle he responds: "'Hark! the infernal orgies!
that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence
aft! Methinks it pictures life'" (pp. 228-9). He

separates himself from these horrors at the cost of

community:

137

'Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh,

life! 'tis in an hour like this, with soul beat
down and held to knowledge, -- as wild, untutored
things are forced to feed -— Oh, life! 'tis now

that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but

'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with

the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I

try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures!‘

(p. 229).
Another way he portrays his need to be perfect is to deny
the reality of these horrors. If he fears his own inner
cannibalism, denying cannibalism in nature will help him
feel his own innocence. Starbuck's desire for a pure
world is stronger than his desire for reality. As he
penetrates further and further into the heart of the
Japanese cruising ground, he verbalizes that his desire to
believe in a benevolent universe is the strongest force
within him: "'Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw
in his young bride's eye! -- Tell me not of thy teeth—
tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let
faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down
and do believe'" (p. 624).

Another way Starbuck portrays his need to be
perfect is in his desire for rules. Whaling is an accept-
able industry only in as much as its rules are well-
delineated and carefully obeyed. He is extremely order
conscious, and respects the socially stratified power

structure on the whaler as perfectly as possible. He,

unlike Ahab, would do nothing to offend the owners. He

138

is comfortable being brave as long as it is in the name of
doing his duty well:

'I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws

of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in

the way of the business we follow; but I came here

to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance' (p. 220).
He again portrays his need for limits in his attitude
toward his fellow boatsman: "'I will have no man in my
boat. . .who is not afraid of a whale'" (p. 158).

When Ishmael defines him as a "staid, steadfast
man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime
of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds" (p. 158),
Ishmael chose the exact image to best describe Starbuck's
particular type of action: pantomime. Starbuck's action
is tense rather than rhythmical. He is comfortable only
with controlled assertion, thus his activity pantomimes
life, lacking the quality of spontaneity that would render
it vitally fluid.

Starbuck protects himself from vice by controlling
his emotional response as much as he is able. He does not
allow himself to enjoy his activities. Whaling, for him,
is a duty, a necessity, something that his father and
brother died doing. If Starbuck is a good sailor, it is
because he is supposed to be a good sailor. He neither

laughs nor revels in his prosperity. Successful whaling

proves he is a good whaler; it does not make him joyful.

139

Unconsciously, he looks down upon his fellow whalers
because their response is not equally serious to his own.
He demands that they exert themselves as much as he does:

'Oars! Oars!‘ he intensely whispered, seizing

the helm -- 'gripe your oars and clutch your
souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him
off, you Queequeg -- the whale there! -- prick
him! -- hit him! Stand up -- stand up, and stay
so! Spring, out men -- pull, men; never mind
their backs -- scrape them! -- scrape away!'"

(pp. 500-1).
When rules are delineated he expects them to be adhered
to as closely as possible.

Given a specific context, Starbuck's perfectionism
allows him to be assertive. He functions very well. For
instance, when surrounded by countless sperm whale during
the "Grand Armada" chapter, he stands up in the bow of
his boat, lance in hand, aggressively pricking out of the
way whatever whale he can reach. He demonstrates no fear,
no loss of control, no need of God (p. 494). Within a
context, Starbuck's freezing passivity can be suspended.
During one of the hunt scenes, Ishmael notes the serenity
of his eyes: "looking into his eyes you seemed to see
there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold
perils he had calmly confronted through life" (p. 158).
His eyes, regardless of the physical peril surrounding
him, contain neither joy nor pain. Starbuck is simply
satisfied when he can do what it is that he is supposed

to do. By being a good whaler, Starbuck could appropriately

140

vent his aggression and expansive nature and still feel
virtuous. He could prove his skill without feeling
arrogant. The system of whaling frees him to act:

'Pull, pull, my good boys,‘ said Starbuck, in
the lowest possible but intensest concentrated
whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow,
almost seemed as two visible needles in two
unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say
much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say
anything to him. Only the silence of the boat
was at intervals startlingly pierced by

one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with
command, now soft with entreaty (pp. 297-8).

Without the safety of a system, the same behavior he
could comfortably portray within bounds made him shudder:

Never could Starbuck forget the old man's
aspect, when one night going down into the
cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw
him with closed eyes sitting straight in his
floor-screwed chair: the rain and half-melted
sleet of the storm. . .still slowly dripping
from the unremoved hat and coat. . . .Though
the body was erect, the head was thrown back
so that the closed eyes were pointed towards
the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a
beam in the ceiling.

Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with
a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou
steadfastly eyest thou purpose (p. 313).

Starbuck can be perfect only in a simple world:
a world where the opposite of truth is falseness, rather
than another, no less valid, truth. He wants this world
to exist, yet he himself senses something deeper, more
complicated in nature. Rather than confront what he can-
not understand, he prefers avoiding it. For instance,

when faced with the complicated patterning of the doubloon

141

Ahab has nailed to the masthead, and faced with his own
intricate response to it, he verbalizes his need to with-
draw from it and from his own thought: "'This coin speaks
wisely, mildly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it,
lest Truth shake me falsely'" (p. 552). Starbuck has
perceived a world where change is inevitable, one which
he cannot control regardless of emotional need and this
world makes him fear that he will reject his moral
structure. He is afraid to look too closely, for if he
rejects the world he sees, if he rejects his system, then
virtue, in the regimented way he perceives it, will become
an impossibility. He prefers a truth less profound, less
dangerous, one that does not require, as Ahab‘s does,
sinking into darkness and rising into air.
Starbuck's world is no less complicated than Ahab's.

The major difference between them lay in their solutions.
Ahab attempts to break through the world's inscrutable
wall; Starbuck attempts to evade complications when he
can, and trust in God when he cannot. Unlike Ahab, in
studying the gold coin, Starbuck sees God's, rather than
his own,shadow, but like Ahab he too feels evil portents:

A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding

peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint

earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God

girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun

of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope.

If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows his
mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun

142
meets our glance halfway, to cheer. Yet, oh,
the great sun is no future. . . (p. 551).

Starbuck finds life's complexities offensive.
Early in the journey, when the white squid appears in the
Atlantic, it evokes more fear in him than the possibility
of a direct fight even with Moby Dick (p. 306). The squid,
with all its white, grasping tentacles, somehow seems less
controllable. Starbuck also has the tendency to avoid
information when he can. When Captain Derick De Deer,
the Captain of the Virgin, waves a lamp-feeder at the
Pequod, Starbuck responds by not believing that this
action indicates an oil-free ship (p. 453). When this
same whale ship, after having been given oil by the Pequod,
chases after the same whale as it does, Starbuck is unable
to ignore the unfairness of the situation. He responds
with impotent anger. His own value system would never
have allowed him to chase the same whale as someone who
has just aided him. He is outraged that the captain of
the Virgin has different, and therefore inferior, values.
Starbuck cries in frustration: "'The ungracious and
ungrateful dog!. . .he mocks and dares me with the very
poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!'" (p. 455).

He is frustrated because the people he must
interact with do not share his values, and he is frustrated
because nature itself ignores his sense of values: if he

chases and catches a whale, then the whale must not sink.

143

When Starbuck captures a whale and it is obviously sinking,
he will not let go of it, though it seems to be tilting
the ship. Other whaleman seize control and cut the whale
from the ship (p. 463). While Starbuck can sail in a
foggy squall or go "plump on a flying whale" (p. 303),

he is not equal to the unfairness he sees surrounding him.
When he wins a battle he expects to gain the whale oil.

Although Starbuck prefers to ignore reality, when
he cannot he deals with uncomfortable aspects of it as
perfunctorily as possible. Starbuck accepts the fact
that Queequeg's coffin is to be made into a lifebuoy. The
action is practical: the original life-buoy has been lost
at sea. But he is angry at being forced to order the
action, since it is more ironic than his value system can
easily encompass. He is angry that he must appear strange
in other's eyes: "'Bring it up: there's nothing else for
it,‘ said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause.‘ Rig it,
carpenter: do not look at me so -- the coffin, I mean.

Dost thou hear me? Rig it'" (p. 662). The carpenter
notes his unwillingness to see the task through: "The
whole he can endure, at the part he balks" (p. 663).

The carpenter, by perceiving that Starbuck, although
comfortable with parts, dislikes the whole for it is too
uncontrollable, is making an important observation concern-
ing his personality. While he, when placed in a situation

that goes against his value system would sometimes act, he

144

does so with hesitancy, if at all. Starbuck, when he can,
tries to escape from those parts of life that confuse him
and make him question his values. This tendency toward

self-deception and escapism is a usual one in individuals

attempting to be perfect.7

By walking away in a huff

from the life-buoy incident, he can avoid seeing the

ironic act ennacted. He can partially blame others for
the action and thus protect himself. Starbuck prefers

not to see people callously rigging a coffin in the place
of a life-buoy. The less callousness he perceives in

human nature, the more he will be able to remain a

believer in human sensitivity. He prefers as little direct
information about people as possible.

Starbuck shows sensitivity to human suffering,
sensitivity unusual on the Pequod. He defends Dough Boy
against Stubb's abuse. When Queequeg goes through the
harrowing experience of cutting into a whale and Stubb
orders him to bring Queequeg some refreshment, Dough Boy
brings Queequeg ginger jub rather than an alcoholic
beverage. He is innocently following Miss Charity's
orders but Stubb angrily strikes him for bringing the tea.
Starbuck interrupts the scene and silences Stubb's
abortive defense: "'Enough. . .only don't hit him again,

but. . . .Only this: go down with him, and get what thou

wantest thyself'" (p. 419). Starbuck identifies with

145

0

Dough Boy, a defenseless victim to a system he cannot
comprehend. Starbuck's hatred for unfair abuse surfaces
again when Flask offers an old sick whale a whale-line
sling to hold his damaged starboard fin: Starbuck responds,
showing identification for the victim: "'Mind he don't
sling thee with it'" (p. 455). When Flask chooses to
unnecessarily castrate the whale (p. 461), Starbuck
abortively attempts to stop him (p. 461). But when he
fails to do so, he chooses to ignore Flask's act of
unnecessary cruelty. Rather than castigating Flask, he
simply orders his men to secure the whale to the ship
(p. 462). The less he deals with the situation, the
easier it is for him to consider himself free of complic-
ity in the act, and the easier it is for him to avoid
dealing with Flask's cruelty. Karen Horney sees the
tendency toward self-deception as a characteristic related
to perfectionism:

What really matters is not those petty details

but the flawless excellence of the whole conduct

of life. But, since all he can achieve is

behavioristic perfection, another device is

necessary. This is to equate in his mind

standards and actualities -- knowing about moral

values and 'being' a good person.

Starbuck's passivity, his fear of non-contextual

responsibility, and his ability to deceive himself into
believing that he always acts appropriately are all related

to his unwillingness to confront his idealistic value

system. His lack of activity does not come from either a

146

lack of sensitivity or a lack of intellect. On the
contrary, Starbuck demonstrates both these qualities. He
is the first man to realize that Ahab wants to use the
voyage to gain revenge on Moby Dick (p. 219). He is not
simply paranoid about the whale hunt, but rightfully fears
its outcome. He feels his vision superior to his fellow
whalers' and his vision proves correct. Unable
to act himself, he tries to verbalize his insights to
Stubb, perhaps indirectly attempting to convince Stubb to
act when he himself cannot:

'Here!‘ cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the

shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the

weather bow, 'markest thou not that the gale

come from eastward, the very course Ahab is

to run for Moby Dick? the very course he

swung to this day noon? Now mark his boat

there; where is that stove? In the stern-

sheets, man; where he is wont to stand -- his

stand-point is stove man!. . .The gale that

now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it

into a fair wind that will drive us towards

home' (pp. 637-8).
Starbuck is unwilling to take action which will make him
a victimizer, thus imperfect, but he is aware that the
ship's course is suicidal.

Starbuck protects himself from feelings of self-

hate by using God as a buffer. As long as he believes he
is obeying God, Starbuck can accept his fate and die, in

his estimation, a martyr to his purity. He insists that

there is hope outside of his own actions: "'His heaven

147

insulting purpose, God may wedge aside'" (p. 228). Even
when he feels wetness seeping into his bones, he ration-
alizes that God wants him to remain passive to Ahab's
quest:

'Against the wind he now steers for the open

jaw,‘ murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled

the new-hauled mainbrace upon the rail. 'God keep

us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and

from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that

I disobey my God in obeying him!‘ (p. 711).
Starbuck shows his insecurity by using a triple negative
in his speech, yet he stays with his need to be passive,
an attitude he believes that his God approves. His fate.
as horrid as it is, will be in obedience to God's desires.

Starbuck continues to use God to keep himself

from questioning his values. If all things turn to dust,
then he might as well remain pure and let fate take its
course:

'I have sat before the dense coal fire and

watched it all aglow, full of its tormented

flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last,

down, down, to the dumbest dust. Old man of

oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what

will at length remain but one little heap of

ashes!‘ (p. 635).
Starbuck attempts to convince Ahab to remain passive, but
he will take no action to insure it. Instead he continues
to believe that somehow, regardless of what direction his

life takes, that all will be for the best. He will

continue to do his duty and leave the rest to fate (p. 294).

148

Starbuck's relationship with Ahab is an essential
element in his perfectionistic solution. He uses Ahab as
a person on whom he can project his aggression and his
desire to break through the system and understand life's
meaning. It is easier for Starbuck to define himself as
incapable of fighting without divine intervention when he
has an individual on whom to project strength. He uses
Ahab to simplify himself, by making him the personification
of his own assertiveness.

Starbuck is unwilling to understand Ahab's dream
of revenge, but on an unconscious level the dream is his
own. He does not know that while he himself is satisfied
choosing impotence over action that he will not deprive
Ahab of his ability to act.

Although Starbuck does not himself care to be
expansive, except within the context of his actions as a
whaler, he very much wants the respect of an expansive
person. As long as he can, Starbuck pretends that Ahab
respects him. When Ahab refuses to give him the respect
he wants, he pretends that Ahab has been accidentally
rude:

'Captain Ahab mistakes: it is I. The oil in
the holding is leaking, sir. We must up Burtons
and break out. . . .Either do that sir, or waste

in one day more oil than we may make good in a
year' (p. 603).

149

When Ahab behaves offensively, Starbuck simply lowers his
eyes and turns away pale and shivering (pp. 221-5).
Rather than accepting the power of his own personality,
he turns from Ahab, mumbling his responses, asking God to
keep both him and the crew (p. 222). Even when he acts
bravely, when he refuses to simply have Ahab order him on
deck, he hesitates to act.

During his most volatile account with Ahab, when
the oil in the hold is leaking,Starbuck works very hard
to remain as peaceful as he can. Attempting to ignore
the potential violence of the scene, he meets Ahab's
verbal demand that he return to deck with reluctant
assertiveness. Ishmael, at this point an omniscient
narrator, notices that Starbuck, even as he moves forward
in the cabin,seems torn between action and passivity.
Starbuck approaches Ahab "with a daring so strangely
respectful and cautious that it almost seemed not only
every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifes-
tation of itself, but within also seemed more than half
distrustful of itself" (p. 604). When he does make a
demand of Ahab, it is for him to be understanding: "'And
I do dare, sir -- to be forebearing! Shall we not under-
stand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?'"
(p. 604). His demand is pleading. Starbuck does not

forget to respectfully call Ahab, "Captain."

150

When Ahab responds to Starbuck by threatening him
with a musket, Starbuck maintains control and focuses on
the lack of respect he has been shown. He attempts to
maintain his own sense of integrity,verbalizing that the
responsibility of action is not on him, but on Ahab:

For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate,
and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost
thought that he had really received the blaze of
the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion,
he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin,
paused for an instand and said: 'Thou has out-
raged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask
thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst

but laugh, but let Ahab beware of Ahab: beware
of thyself, old man' (pp. 604-5).

Starbuck is caught between his desire to be passive
and his desire to be honored and honorable. He will not
take control of the situation and actively end Ahab's
quest. He alternately cries to God and to Ahab to take
control. "'Great God! but for one single instant show
thyself' cried Starbuck, 'never, never wilt thou capture
him, old man -- In Jesus' name no more of this, that's
worse than devil's madness'" (p. 706).

He believes even the smallest sign of Ahab's
uncertainty demonstrates the passive victory for which he
hopes. His optimism is self-willed blindness, yet he
persists in it: "'Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble
soul! grand old heart, after all!'" (p. 684).

It is importanttx>note that Starbuck, in the name

of perfectionism, protects Ahab more than he protects

151

himself. Starbuck verbalizes his willingness to stay tied
to Ahab:
'My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and
by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should
ground arms on such a field!. . . .Will, I nill I, the
uneffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a
cable I have no knife to cut. . .Oh! I plainly see my
miserable office -- to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
to hate with touch of pity! (p. 228).
In the name of inability, he remains a tool to Ahab's venge-
ance. Even though he finds himself incapable of separation
from Ahab, incapable of untying the ropes which connect them,
he feels that he can never allow Ahab to remain tied:
'. . . .Say he were pinioned even: knotted all over
with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts
on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a
caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight;
could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort,
sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on
the long intolerable voyage. . .' (p. 651).

While Starbuck refuses to be assertive himself, he
protects Ahab's assertiveness at the cost of the entire
crew's lives. Not only is Starbuck protecting himself from
the evil of activity, from the corruption of being the
victimizer, but he also is protecting Ahab's assertiveness.
Vicariously, he seems to be experiencing a great deal of
passion through Ahab which he will not allow himself to feel
directly, and he is willing to protect this passion at any
cost. Starbuck does not feel that he is protecting Ahab
because he unconsciously wants to be Ahab, but rather feels

that he is protecting him because at bottom, Ahab too, has

a human heart as pure as his own. But one must keep in mind

152

that Starbuck does not protect Ahab's equally to his own but
more than his own. Thus, through Ahab, Starbuck can simul-
taneously protect himself from sordid activity and can
vicariously protect himself from the knowledge of chains.
Starbuck, even in the face of death, will stay as

pure as possible. Even on the third day of the chase when
Starbuck is fully convinced that Ahab will persist in his
blasphemous revenge, he will do nothing. He only hopes to
maintain his own non-action oriented integrity:

'The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all

ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not

Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's fainting

fit. Up helm, I say -- ye fools, the jaw! the jaw!

Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my

life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy

work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay nay! Up helm

again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable

brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he

cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!‘ (p. 719).
Starbuck is afraid that he will lose courage to die, and he
is bitter that all his rules and fidelities have led him to
this death. But he is not so bitter that he will not do his
duty, not so angry that he will discard a value system that
has led him to this point. Rather, he will trust to God to
allow him at least the virtue of a firm, unyielding death.

Melville, in his creation of other characters in

Moby-Dick, continues his exploration of personality. Ishmael

is the most complex character in Moby-Dick. He serves as its

 

narrator, fluctuating between omniscience and unreliability.

He is both its main character, the only survivor of the

153

whaling voyage, and yet one so minor that his recurrent
disappearance from the novel seems natural. Psychologically,
he is the most difficult to analyze. His solution to life's
complexities varies from healthy interest in objective real-
ity to a protective detachment which distorts his experiences.
While Ahab's solution to life's complexities is to strike
through the pasteboard mask and Starbuck's is to virtuously
obey, Ishmael flits between honest observation and protective
rationalization.

In order to understand Ishmael's search, it is
essential to comprehend not so much for what he is looking,
because he himself is uncertain about this, but from what
he is protecting himself. Although Ishmael does not know the
origin of his needs and defenses, he is aware that he is
protective. One of his greatest needs is to be free from

demands. In "Loomings,“ the first chapter of Moby-Dick,

 

Ishmael confesses this fear of coercion, admitting that he
goes to sea, not so much for the sake of being mystical,
although he associates water with mysticism, but rather to
escape from the desperate feelings that recurringly encompass
him on land:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul;
whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before
coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every
funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get
such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong
moral principle to prevent me from deliberately step-
stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people's hats off -- then I account it high time to

154

get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute

for pistol and ball (p. 23).
In this self-analysis Ishmael reveals that he is less
interested in being free for other activities than in
being free from undesirable demands: he is less interested
in experiencing life at sea then in escaping the tensions
of life on land.

Ishmael's need to escape becomes understandable if
one looks at his youth. He does not give the reader much
information about his early years, but what information he
reveals depicts a childhood filled with pain. Ishmael is
an orphan, raised by a stern step-mother who frequently
beats him and sends him to bed supperless. He recounts
an incident where he is punished for climbing up a chimney:

-- my mother dragged me by the legs out of the

chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was

only two o'clock in the afternoon of the let

June, the longest day in the year in our hemi-

sphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was no

help for it, so up stairs I went to my little

room in the third floor, undressed myself as

slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with

a bitter sigh got between the sheets (p. 53).
Ishmael begs for pity: he returns down stairs asking to
be beaten rather than condemned to bed. His step-mother
refuses to change the punishment. When Ishmael returns
up stairs and finally falls asleep his dream reveals a
deep sense of fear, and a frightening powerlessness:

. . .half-steeped in dreams -- I opened my eyes,

and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in
outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running

155

through all my frame: nothing was to be seen,
and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural
hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over
the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable
silent form or phantom, to which the hand be-
longed, seemed closely seated by my bedside.
For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there,
frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to
drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I
could but stir it one single inch, the horrid
spell would be broken (p. 53).

In his dream, Ishmael is clear that if he can stir his
hand, he can regain control, but he cannot stir his hand.
Much of Ishmael's adulthood is oriented toward

avoiding such feelings of powerlessness. He strongly
believes that an individual must be free, if he is to be
vital: thick walls are necessary to maintain essential
interior spaciousness (p. 401). Ishmael works hard to
protect this interior spaciousness. He is more comfortable
willingly giving up all power over life, than somehow
having it taken from him. At his first capsizing he
feels so vulnerable that he decides to write out a will.
He confesses that he has written wills before and that he
is most happy when he expects least from life:

This was the fourth time in my nautical life that

I had done the same thing. After the ceremony

was concluded upon the present occasion I felt

all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my

heart. Besides, all the days I lived would be

as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his

resurrection. . . .Now then, thought I, uncon-

sciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here

goes for a cool, collected dive at death and

destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost
(p. 304). .

156

Ishmael is demonstrating an important aspect of his
personality: he is most comfortable when he is resigned
to his fate. Squalls, capsizings, bivouacs on the deep,
are common occurrences in the whaling industry. Fre-
quently his life is entrusted into the hands of a man who
steers the boat, or one who holds the other end of a rope.
The less control he demands and expects, the smaller, he
hopes, will be his pain.

Ishmael's self-protection is also revealed in his
assumption that the world is basically destructive. By
being both pessimistic and accepting, he cannot be hurt:

-- what matters it, after all? Are you not the
precious image of each and all of us men in this
whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in,
is life; those sharks, your foes; those spades,
your friends; and what between sharks and spades
you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad
(p. 418).
Even Ishmael's narrative technique is protective. His
statements about his narration are designed to make
critical comments ineffectual: "I care not to perform
this part of my task methodically; but shall be content
to produce the desired impression by separate citations
of items. . .I take it -- the conclusion aimed at will
naturally follow of itself" (p. 273). He displaces
blame for miscomprehension from himself to his reader.

He feigns chaotic listing, detaching himself from his

need for a pattern that will hold. If he expects

157

little, if his reader expects less, then suffering will
be minimal.

Wherever Ishmael looks, he sees patterns. . .and
there is an honest, searching, brave part of him that is
attempting to allow the book to generate its own methods,
symbols and patterns: "Out of the trunk, the branches
grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects
grow the chapters" (p. 379). He looks at the physical
images on his journey, extrapolating what metaphysical
meaning from them that he can. A romantic by nature, he
has problems keeping his images earthly: their relation-
ship to one another hints of dark, spiritual meanings. At
the very outset of his journey one finds him analyzing
and exploring:

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and
off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas;
and as the short northern day merged into night,
we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry
ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as
in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the
bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the
white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast
curving icicles depended from the bows (p. 145).
In this scene, Christmas and cannibalism merge. In other
scenes Ishmael focuses on hieroglyphical patterns. He
notices mystical patterns in the water, on the whale deck
and in the cordage. There are prints on Queequeg, Ishmael

and even Bildad. Yet, aware that patterns exist, Ishmael

does not understand them. He knows that there are large

158

gaps in his knowledge, gaps that he cannot fill. The
universe, like the Old Testament God, will not reveal it-
self.

Ishmael has an artist's sensibility, always
forming new gestalts. During the storm when the corpusants
light the mast, Ishmael observes:

Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real
stature, and seemed the black cloud from which
the thunder had come. The parted mouth of
Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which
strangely gleamed as if they too had been tipped
by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural
light, Queequeg's tatooing burned like Satanic
blue flames on his body (p. 640).

Ishmael is also drawn to religion and science.
He uses sacred imagery to explain how the oil casks are
hermetically closed and walled (p. 546). There is blood
in the oil, and its combination is therefore sacrificial.
Ashes, fire, cleansing, the sacred quarter deck, are all
associated with the process. He portrays his interest in
science when discussing the roundness of the pots used
in the try-works:

While employed in polishing them -- one man in
each pot, side by side -- many confidential
communications are carried on, over the iron
lips. It is a place also for profound mathe-
matical meditation. It was in the left hand
try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone
diligently circling round me, that I was first
indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that
in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid,
my soapstone for example, will descend from any
point in precisely the same time (p. 538).

159

Ishmael both observes the workings of gravity and the
mysteries of paralleliSm. He is not, as Milton Stern
would have the reader believe, mainly a rationalist:
Ishmael is too clear that physical data have their spirit-
ual counterparts.9
Ishmael is intermittently afraid of searching.

The information he gathers leads him to believe that the
invisible spheres are dangerous:

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things

of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints;

yet with me. . . somewhere those things must exist.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world

seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were

formed in fright (p. 263).
He even suggests, in an attempt to protect himself, as
well as his reader, from searching past the surface, that
the amount of curiosity one feels is best carefully checked:

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be

over curious touching the precise nature of the

whale spout. . . .For even when coming into

slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of

the jet, which will often happen, your skin

will feverishly smart, from the acridness of

the thing so touching it. . . .The wisest thing

the investigator can do then, it seems to me,

is to let this deadly spout alone (p. 479).
Ishmael is unconscious of exactly how strongly his own
fears control his actions. When he is afraid, he is most
likely to use logic rather than intuition, and he is most
likely to be rigid rather than fluid. At times he
didactically commands fluidity, without realizing the

irony of demanding nuance:

160

But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
Herschel's great telescope; and his ears
capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would
that make him any longer of sight, or sharper

of hearing? Not at all. -- Why then do you
try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it
(p. 430).

His perceptions of the whale's sense organs becomes an
unconscious opportunity for him to verbalize his fear of
expansion.

While Ishmael feels that expansion is dangerous,
he is even more afraid of the other end of the dialectic,
emptiness:

And some certain significance lurks in all

things, else all things are little worth, and

the round world itself but an empty cipher,

except to sell by the cartload, as they do

hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in

the Milky Way (p. 549).
He finds comfort in watching and analyzing. He prefers
neither to be at the center of action nor asleep. At the
Spouter Inn, Ishmael demonstrates this tendency to
passively observe: "Supper over, the company went back
to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with
myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a
looker on" (p. 40).

Analysis is often more comfortable than experience.
Even in reverie, his tendency is to analyze,thus control
his experience. In reverie Ishmael can repress the

horrible oath and thus find momentary peace, but he is

still at least as interested in understanding theexperience,

161

as in the experience itself. He studies his reverie on the
mast-head:

Ere forgetfullness altogether came over me, I
had noticed that the seamen at the main and
mizen mast-heads were already drowsy. So that
at last all three of us lifelessly swung from
the spars, and for every swing that we made
there was a nod from below from the slumbering
helmsmen. The waves, too, nodded their
indolent crests; and across the wide trance

of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun
over all (p. 373).

Ishmael attempts to be reasonable and observant. When
frustrated and confused, it is easier for him to turn his
anger outward and castigate the human race for its
stupidity. He relates the fact that ships shun the burial
place of whales and responds bitterly to their lack of
logic:

And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the
place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a
vacuum, because their leader originally leaped
there when a stick was held. There's your law of
precedents; there's your utility of traditions;
there's the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now
not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy
(p. 403).

Yet even when Ishmael is being less than objective, he,
in the name of objectivity, will demand that the reader
either accept his theory, or consider himself a fool:

. . .though the Sperm Whale stove a passage
through the Isthmus of Darren, and mixed the
Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not
elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless
you own the whale, you are but a provincial
and sentimentalist in Truth (pp. 437-8).

162

At times, Ishmael so fervently needs a workable
order that he deletes information that cannot comfortably
fit into his system of classification. For instance, if
the pig fish is not, in his estimation, good enough to be
a whale, Ishmael will simply remove him from the whale
family (p. 183). His demand for simplification sometimes
verges on being reactionary. When Ishmael suggests that
rather than tie a right and sperm whale to each side of
a ship to prevent capsizals, to simply leave the whaler
alone (pp. 425-6» his response is sensible: magical
preventions are time-consuming and dangerously complicated.
But he suggests that John Locke and Immanuel Kant also be
thrown overboard. To extend his reasoning so that Locke
and Kant are rejected as writers of worthless jargon seems
counter-productive to his own search for understanding.

At other times Ishmael distances himself from his
need for analysis and order by laughing at himself. He
recalls a journey where his ship encounters a small whale:

In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale
was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke
or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the
harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think
you I let that chance go, without using my boat-
hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal
and reading all the contents of that young cub?
(p. 572).
The same man who has earlier suggested that Locke and Kant

be discarded also uses hermeneutical imagery to describe

his physiological studies: he will "break the seal" of

163

the whale and "read" its contents. Ishmael can no more
discard philosophy than remain objective.

Humor serves to insulate Ishmael from the depth
of his fear. Temporarily, a laugh distances him emotion-
ally from what he cannot understand. It allows him to
accept the mystery without seriously trying to explain it.
Ishmael verbalizes that the possibility that life is no
more than a joke comforts him even if the joke is at his
expense (p. 302). He uses his humor to protect him from
taking his own experiences and his own writing too

seriously. At the beginning of Moby-Dick, after Ishmael

 

spends some time philosophizing about his journey toward
the Pacific, and after he spends a good deal of energy
trying to decide which New Bedford inn to enter, and
after discussing the necessity of passion at any cost, he
reduces his perceptions to the derogatory term, "blubber-
ing": "But no more of this blubbering now, we are going
a-Whaling,and there is plenty of that yet to come"

(p. 35). In order to protect himself from the depth and
seriousness of his perceptions, Ishmael is willing to
insult the worth of his ideas. By punning upon the word,
blubber, Ishmael is also able to transfer the reader's
focus from the metaphysical concepts which frighten him,
to the physical, and thus more controllable world of

whaling.

164

Ishmael is equally willing to turn his humor
against innocents. He heartily laughs at the priests of
Tranque, a fantasy island of his own creation, who are
morally offended at his blasphemous desire to measure
their god, a whale skeleton:

'How now!‘ they shouted; 'Dar'st thou measure this

our god! That's for us!‘ 'Aye, priest -- well,

how long do ye make him, then!‘ But hereupon a

fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet

and inches; they cracked each other's sconces

with their yard-sticks -- the great skull echoes

-- and seizing that luck chance, I quickly

concluded my own admeasurements (p. 575).
Ishmael pleasantly creates a slap-stick comedy routine,
playing the straight man to characters who act delightfully
immature. He continues his tale of absurdity without
faltering, telling his reader that after taking the
measurements, he tatooed them on his body, rounding off
his figures in order to save space for a poem he is
possibly going to compose at a later time. When relaxed,
he can transcend facts joyfully.

Ishmael enjoys laughing at the human situation.
Even Pythagoras is not so important that he cannot be the
object of jest. He fantasizes having met with Pythagoras,
when Pythagoras was an inexperienced sailor:

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that
in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did
die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with
thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage --

and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green
simple boy, how to splice rope (p. 548).

165

Ishmael cannot resist extending a metaphor. He
ends his chapter on whaling houses and the hedonism of
British and Dutch whalers with "and this empties the
decanter." After discussing food and drink, he enjoys
making his chapter a vessel. He demonstrates this joyful
wit in discussing the size of whales and his own relation-
ship to his subject:

One often hears of writers that rise and swell
with their subject, though it may seem but an
ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of
this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography
expands into placard capitals. Give me a
condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for
an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! (p. 580).

There is underlying bitterness in some of his
jests which demonstrates that he feels abused by fate.
He uses the metaphor of a "grand program". to describe
his whaling voyage and he questions why his part is so
shabby:

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that
those stage managers, the Fates, put me down

for this shabby part. . .yet, now that I recall
all the circumstances, I think I can see a

little into the springs and motives which being
cunningly presented to me under various disguises,
induced me to set about performing the part I did,
besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was

a choice resulting from my own unbiased free will
and discriminating judgment (p. 29).

But Ishmael does not always deal with his confusion
by relying on humor. There are times when Ishmael feels
insulated enough to directly admit his confusion without

relying on either humor or bitterness:

166

And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,

wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters'

Fields of all four continents, the waves

should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceas-

ingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and

shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms,

reveries; all that we call lives and souls,

lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like

slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling

waves but made so by their restlessness

(p. 613).
Ishmael could intermittently see that it was foolish to
have too much pride in anything, including reason (p. 471).
And he could forgive error, forgive foolishness, since
all men learn by descending (p. 540), and since no
position is permanent or true except in contrast (p. 86).
Power, although it may momentarily relieve pressure, is
not to be trusted for it is equally indifferent to it-
self and to others (pp. 450-1). Life is precarious:
whales can be chased, irons recovered, but ships still
sink (p. 278). Ishmael fluctuates as to whether searching
for truth is a useful endeavor, but he realizes, much of
the time, that his search is desperately serious. He
admits that part of him wants to leave from the original
port, and that he longs to find his paternity, and thus
his own identity. At times he is convinced that he can
know it only after death; at other times he thinks it
possible to find on earth. Intelligently or destructively,

the whale rouses all his curiosity as does the wild seas

and nameless perils (pp. 29-30). As protective as parts

167

of Ishmael are, other parts insist on asserting their
power too, and these are expansive. As much as he can,
given his deep fear of powerlessness, he allows these
expansive, searching parts to grow.

One can learn much about Ishmael by the type of
images he studies and the way he studies them. His
perceptions during the "Grand Armada" chapter and his
exploration of the doubloon, the equator and the whale
line reflect a spirit grappling with reality.10 One can
also gain insights into his personality by looking at his
attitude toward and his relationship with people.

Generally an introvert, Ishmael knows that he is
easily influenced by those people with whom he does come
into contact. When he decides to ship on the Pequod, he
is so overwhelmed by Captain Bildad's intensity that he
begins to talk like him, answering his question with "I
dost," the Quaker version of "I do." Unconsciously he
discards his own speech patterns when faced with a more
forceful personality than his own.

He does not want to be weak, thus when he focuses
on Starbuck, Starbuck's fall from valor becomes an over-
powering element in the way Ishmael perceives him: it is
Starbuck's incompetent display of rightmindedness that
morally enfeebles the ship (p. 251) in Ishmael's judgment.

Ishmael's response to Pip also seems to stem from Ishmael's

168

fear of vulnerability. In the midst of stating that few
people return from oceanic court, Ishmael remembers Pip's
leap into the ocean. He abruptly interrupts the idea
and tone of his narrative to discuss Pip's horrifying
experience. Pain flows through his language:

Black Little Pip -- he never did -- oh, no! he

went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim

Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him

beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal

time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck

on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and

beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward

here, hailed a hero there! (pp. 166-7).
Ishmael is afraid of losing his identity. He questions
the usefulness of receptivity if it makes one vulnerable.
It is receptivity to spiritual vibrations which has
caused, in his mind, Starbuck's fall of valor in the soul
(p. 160), and Pip's madness. He associates fluidity with
death, yet it is in death that he feels wisdom can be
best attained.

Ishmael would prefer to be strong and invulnerable.

When discussing the whale's spine, he chooses to identify
himself with its power: "A thin joist of a spine never
yet upheld a full and novel soul. I rejoice in my spine,
as in the firm audacious staff of the flag which I fling
half out to the world" (p. 451). His frustration at
complexity leads him to make statements about the classi-

fication of people. He feels that generally they are as

categorical as carpenter's nails (p. 594).

169

Generally, Ishmael is unclear how much he wants
to identify with the human race. This confusion is
demonstrated in his variable attitude toward the Pequod's
crew. At times he feels fully identified: "I, Ishmael,
was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
my oath had been welded with theirs" (p. 239). But when
the Pequod crosses the equator and the first man who
mounts the masthead falls to his death, Ishmael separates
himself from the other men on the Pequod: while the crew
is generally relieved that the presaged evil has been
finally fulfilled, Ishmael feels that the death forshadows
a darker evil to come. When he recalls the crew's
response to the second day of the chase, he speaks of
them in such as way as to imply his complete separation:

The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls;
and by the stirring perils of the previous day;
the rack of the past night's suspense; the
fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which
their wild craft went plunging towards its
flying mark; by all these things, their hearts
were bowled along (p. 700).

Since identification with other characters is.
often frightening for him, he attempts to control these
feelings by keeping his own personality as mutable as
possible. As long as he is controlling change, he feels
more secure. Ishmael moves from drama to cetology, from

character to stage director,and from scholar to sailor.

While mobile, he can touch the forces at work within him

170

and still maintain a sense of freedom. He longs for an
innocence that will simply allow him to be:

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocence of the azure!
Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round
us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe!
But so have I seen little Mirian and Martha,
laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed
locks which grew on the marge of the burnt-out
crater of his brain (p. 682).

Although part of Ishmael may have been happier
had he been perfectly insulated, perfectly oblivious,
perfectly innocent,he was not. As afraid of relationships
as he was, the most positive relationship portrayed in

Moby-Dick was his relationship with Queequeg. Like him,

 

Queequeg was a creature in a transition state, neither
caterpillar, nor butterfly (p. 140). Ishmael decides to
trust him: "I'll try a pagan friend, thought I,since
Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy" (p. 84).
He may associate marriage and relationships with death
(p. 167), but he also associates death with knowledge.
Domesticity, generally, gives him pleasure. He sees the
ship's deck as a parlor (p. 374), and though he tells the
reader that parlors are ultimately as dangerous as ships,
he seems to enjoy the domesticity of the image. He also
takes pleasure in the officer's dining ritual (p. 374),
even as he perceives the problems it brought Flask, the
third mate who ritualistically is the last to be seated

and the first to rise. With Queequeg, Ishmael forms an

171

almost domestic relationship, one where neither party is
consumed nor consuming, one where Ishmael, the orphan who
has known little domestic comfort can temporarily rest.
If all people, those on water and those on land, are born
with a halter around their neck, Ishmael prefers, at
least temporarily in his relationship with Queequeg, not
to focus upon it.

One of the reasons Ishmael was able to form a
close relationship with Queequeg when so strong a part
of him cries out for protection is because he feels that
Queequeg's background is so different from his own that
fear of merging can be suspended. During the mat-maker
scene, Ishmael takes pleasure in feeling the security of
separation mingled with a comfortable degree of identifi-
cation: ". . .each silent sailor resolved into his own
invisible self" (p. 287). Ishmael tries hard to believe
in their separation:

After all, I do not think that my remarks about
religion made much impression upon Queequeg.
Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed
dull of hearing on that important subject,
unless considered from his own point of view;
and, in the second place, he did not more than
one third understand me, couch my ideas simply
as I would. . .(pp. 126-7).
He projects differences between them which help him believe

in their separation and allows Queequeg the unconscious-

ness, the insulation, he feels he lacks:

172

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from

home,. . .thrown among people as strange to him

as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet

he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the

utmost serenity; content with his own companion-

ship; always equal to himself (p. 83).
The peacefulness that Ishmael has not achieved is
projected upon Queequeg: Ramai, it will do, it is easy
(p. 610). Ishmael allows Queequeg to feel concern without
feeling overpowered by this caring. He fantasizes that
Queequeg patronizingly, but kindly, believes: "It's a
mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals
must help these Christians“ (p. 96). Ishmael allows
Queequeg to make him feel so secure that Ishmael can allow
himself to be forced to choose the ship without feeling
frightened by Queequeg's coercion (p. 103).

Through Queequeg, Ishmael is able to get some of
his dependency needs met. At times he is angry at his
vulnerability to Queequeg but never angry enough to
seriously consider terminating their relationship. The
idea of losing control makes him uncomfortable. He portrays
his discomfort during the monkey-rope scene:

But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as

I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came

very near sliding overboard. Nor could I

possibly forget that, do what I would, I only

had the management of one end of it (p. 416).
Ishmael could not comfortably idealize himself, but he

could idealize Queequeg. During the "Grand Armada"

chapter, he watches Queequeg gain control even while

173

rowing between hundreds of whales: "But not a bit daunted,
Queequeg steered us manfully; now steering off from this
monster directly across our route in advance. . ." (p.
404). Ishmael finds in Queequeg the power, purityyand
simplicity that he lacks. When first presented with his
innate generosity, Ishmael is so overwhelmed by it that
he, in his own estimation, henceforth cleaves to him like
a barnacle (p. 95). Queequeg has generously, naturally,
saved the life of a country bumpkin who had just moments
before been irritating him without provocation and refuses
to be played the hero for what he considers a human
gesture. Through Queequeg, Ishmael can associate himself
with human kindness without directly committing himself
to this ideal.
As Ishmael uses the chill of a cool room to help

him feel the pleasure of warmth, so he uses Queequeg as a
contrasting force. Ishmael needs Queequeg to be what he
cannot: a man of firm religious beliefs, one with a
strict sense of limits, one who has so strong a will that
he can even heal himself. Through Queequeg, Ishmael can
enjoy the pleasure of being simply powerful:

Now, there is that noteworthy difference between

savage and civilized; that while a sick,

civilized man may be six months convalescing,

generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-

well again in a day. . . .after sitting on the

windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with

a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his
feet, threw out arms and legs, gave himself a

174

good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and
poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a
fight (p. 612).
If one looks closely at the relationship, one
sees the symbiotic pattern of a mother/child relationship.
Queequeg serves as the nurturer, the bringer of peace,
the morally perfect and physically powerful. Ishmael
even associates Queequeg with the power of childbirth.
When Tashtego sinks in spermacetti, Queequeg helps him
emerge from the whale head, an incident described as a
metaphorical birth. Although Ishmael, the adult, loves
Queequeg because he feels free in the relationship,
Ishmael, the child, loves him not because he is separate,
not because Queequeg is integrated, content with his own
companionship and equal to himself, but because Queequeg
warms and protects him. This possessiveness is best
illustrated in Ishmael's own verbalization: he refers to
Queequeg as "my brave Queequeg" (p. 443).
Ishmael never understands his attraction to
Queequeg. He verbalizes his confusion:
Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see;
Yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn
towards him. And those same things that would
have repelled most others, they were the very
magnets that drew me (p. 84).

It is likely that part of his attraction is because

Queequeg is the ideal mother, offering love without cost.

The existence of this mother/child relationship also helps

175

explain why Ishmael cannot fact Queequeg's mortality.
When Queequeg catches a chill and grows increasingly ill,
Ishmael refuses to admit that his nurturer might be dying.
He focuses away from the emaciated body toward the vital
eyes: ‘
. . .his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller
and fuller; they became of a strange softness of
lustre; and mildly but deeply looked at you there
from his sickness, a wondrous testimony of that
immortal health in him which could not die, or be
weakened (p. 607).
Ishmael is unprepared for separation. As it happens,
Queequeg lives, so Ishmael is not forced to deal with it.
By the end of the novel, Ishmael has lost everything and
is too numb to focus on his loss of Queequeg. Interest-
ingly, it is his nurturer's coffin that saves him, marked
by Queequeg with designs that parallel the tattoos on his
body.

But during the center of the novel, Queequeg is
Ishmael's support, his main nurturer, the central structure
of his precarious world, the man who gives him strength
to move outward and to look at more threatening issues and
more frightening characters: issues such as darkness;
characters such as Ahab.

Because the Ishmael/Queequeg relationship is the

closest one formed in Moby-Dick, it is interesting to

 

compare it to the Melville/Hawthorne relationship. As

Ishmael projects qualities into Queequeg, so Melville

176

projects qualities into Hawthorne: Melville is quite
comfortable with Hawthorne's silences for he can define
them as he will. He verbalizes that these silences make
it easier for him to Open himself up to Hawthorne.11

In spite of communication barriers and misunder-
standings,Melville has Ishmael and Queequeg become
"busom friends." While Melville himself feels that he is
looking toward Hawthorne for an equal, he allows Ishmael
to find a nurturer. This possibly portrays Melville's
unreadiness for a relationship of equals.

Melville, afraid of losing Hawthorne, may be
testing this event when he has Queequeg become so ill
that he almost dies. He portrays Ishmael's inability to
cope with the event and he does not have him die. Yet,
conveniently, before the novel ends, he has Queequeg
drown with the rest of the crew. By causing his death
Melville keeps Ishmael from having to develop a relation-
ship with Queequeg outside of the insulated Pequod.
Ishmael can return to land without the complication of
his "bosom friend." He need not worry about maintaining
the relationship in a less accepting setting. Through
Ishmael and Queequeg, Melville is very likely testing out
some of his own confused feelings toward, and fears of,
his relationship with Hawthorne and his confusion over how

to make it the lifelong relationship for which he longed,

and whether such a relationship were even possible.

177

Ishmael, with Queequeg's support, is more able to
develop his fascination for Ahab. While Queequeg repre-
sents unconscious nobility, Ahab represents supra-conscious
nobility: power at its most self-aware. Queequeg believes
that he fan earn rebaptism; Ahab believes that he can only
be saved by going directly through hell. Ishmael is unable
to maintain a comfortable psychological distance from Ahab.
He moves beyond empathy to identification, trying to
comprehend Ahab's mind, entering places he cannot physic-
ally go, listening to conversations he cannot physically
hear. He responds to Ahab with a wild passion:

A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me:
Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy
ears I learned the history of that murderous
monster against whom I and all the others had
taken our oaths of violence and revenge (p. 239).

Ishmael's relationship with Ahab was clearly one-
sided. Ahab never individually acknowledged his existence,
yet Ishmael watches him with a subtle energy he himself
finds surprising (p. 167). Ishmael, psychologically
protected by his symbiotic relationship with Queequeg,
allows himself, at least at the beginning of his encounter
with Ahab, to play out Ahab's powerful vindictiveness
without actively trying to escape from his (power. He is
attracted to Ahab because Ahab is vindictive, perfectly
self-centered, and god-like in his suffering. When Ahab

appears, Ishmael feels "foreboding shivers" (p. 168). run

over him. His respect for this man who affected him so

178

strangely was even greater than his respect for the
mystical, religious, and humanistic Queequeg:

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all

his Nantucket grimness and shagginess. . . .Oh,

Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs

be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the

deep, and featured in the unbodied air! (p. 199).
Ahab is the part of Ishmael that can be blasphemous, that
is unafraid, that can arrogantly say that our fate makes
us in a way totally independent even of the whims of God.
After looking at the tombstones<1fsailors before going to
sea, Ishmael,frightened by death, discusses how easily
one can become a disbeliever,yet concludes that faith is
irrepressible. Because humans are limited,they are also
limitless: "Methinks my body is but the lees of my better
being. In fact take my body who will,take it I say, it is
not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and
come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for
stave my soul, Jove himself cannot" (p. 66).

Ahab is also the part of him that will eat away
its own heart and liver to gain control, the part that
rejects the finite earth for metaphysics and landlessness.
Ahab is the part of him that chooses to fight power rather
than worship passively, the absurd risk-taker in him, the
part that wishes to knock off people's hats, the part that
goes to sea, not simply to escape coercion, but to meet

the realities of life head on, the part of him that when

passionately inspired can say:

179

With a frigate's anchor for my bridal-bitts and
fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount
that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see
whether the fabled heavens with all their count-
less tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal
sight! (p. 360).

While other parts of Ishmael tend to separate
emotion from intellect, and choose safety, the part of
him that feels united with Ahab is powerfully arational.
Ahab, he projects, allows his "torn body and gashed soul
to bleed into one another and interfuse" (pp. 247-8).
Ishmael fears this blending, this passion, this madness,
but through identification with Ahab, he can temporarily
feel the passion other parts of him are fighting so
desperately to control (pp. 247-8).

If the Ishmael/Queequeg relationship represents a
part of the Melville/Hawthorne relationship, then the
Ishmael/Ahab relationship might be said to represent the

Melville/Moby-Dick relationship. As Ishmael gained

 

strength through his perception of Queequeg and their
relationship to explore the passionate, Ahabian, part of
himself, so Melville gained strength through his percep-
tion of Hawthorne and their relationship to explore the

passionate, creative part of himself. Moby-Dick, was the

 

culmination of that passionate exploration.
Ishmael, through exploring the passionate part of
himself, feels the strong emotions of a man who finds

himself pulling to the charmed, churned circle of the

180

hunted sperm whale (p. 299); but ultimately he grows
frightened and turns toward a safer reality. Although he
has the sensitivity to feel Ahab's passion and his pain,
he fears madness more than he fears escapism. He rejects
Ahab's world as partial, as distorted. But during the
second day of the chase there is a part of him that when
viewing the White Whale again becomes overpowered so that
his need to be rational and safe is suspended. As Ahab's
boat is stricken by Moby Dick, Ishmael's and Ahab's
perceptions merge. Ishmael allows Moby Dick as much
controlled intelligence as Ahab could have, had he been
narrating the scene:

. . .he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with

his flukes from side to side; and whenever a

stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of

the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew

back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon,

as if satisfied that his work for that time was

done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the

ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled

lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller's

methodic pace (p. 704).
The Ishmael who empathizes with Ahab, who like Lazarus
would rather lie down lengthwise along the line of the
equator, who would rather go down to the fiery pit than
be frozen, is not the part of Ishmael that is strongest,
but it is a part that can explore through his relation-
ship with the passionate part of himself. Although

Ishmael's and Ahab's methods are different, Ishmael

perceives that their desire for understanding is similar.

181

While Ahab's desire for truth is overpowered by his need
to be vindicated, Ishmael's is overpowered by his fear of
uncontrol. He rejects the fire of the try-works out of
fear, not out of clear insights. He absolutely, and
therefore falsely, decides that it is an unnatural and
therefore unholy light (p. 540).

While Ishmael wants control, it is not his nature
to get it by absolutely believing in one system. He
leaves that to Ahab. His is a world of patterns he cannot
fully believe in: a world of round, moving things, a world
of crooked streets and crooked directions, a world of
fasting where all human thoughts are partially starved. He
is, during his less frightened moments, aware of his own
subjectivity:

In judging of that tempestuous wind called

Euroclydon. . .it maketh a marvellous difference,

whether thou lookest out at it from a glass

window where the frost is all on the outside,

or whether thou observest it from that sashless

window, where the frost is on both sides (p. 34).
When he verbalizes combining intuition with reality in a
functional way, Ishmael is trying to convince himself that
an ideal world on earth is possible:

. . .through all the thick mists of the dim

doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and

then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly

ray. And for this I thank God; for all have

doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few

along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of

all things earthly, and intuitions of some
things heavenly; this combination makes neither

182

believer nor infidel, but makes a man who

regards them both with equal eye (p. 480).
Regardless of balanced statements like the one above,
Ishmael remains confused. When looking at the doubloon
he focuses on the fact that it is nailed amidst all the
rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes,
but he still wishes to believe that at its center is
unfouled purity: the nail touches only the surface
(p. 549). The whaling industry also elicits confusion in
him:

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling --

a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man

into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have

hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on

earth is my true substance. Methinks that in

looking at things spiritual, we are too much

like oysters observing the sun through the water,

and thinking that thick water the thinnest air.

(p. 66).
Regardless of the fact that he would like to view his
confusion in positive light, regardless of the fact that
he verbalizes that the heart of the doubloon remains
mysteriously undefiled, he is afraid of the evil lurking
at the heart: he never loses his fear of becoming the
weakling youth who lifted the dread goddess' veil at
Sais (pp. 437-8). He generally believes that clear Truth
is a thing for salamander giants to encounter and he never
fully believes he is one.

To trust Ishmael's definition of himself is to

misread Moby-Dick. When Ishmael states: "I try all things;

 

183

I achieve what I can" (p. 446), Ishmael is speaking of
an idealized self. Just as when he chooses to reject the
try-work's ghastly fire, he is simplifying his world in a
way he himself will later reject:

. . .when beholding the tranquil beauty and

brilliancy of the ocen's skin, one forgets the

tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not

willingly remember, that this velvet paw but

conceals a remoreseless fang (p. 623).

Ishmael moves toward open spaces whenever he feels
enclosed and attempts to close spaces whenever he feels
afraid. Like a weaver who chooses disappearing thread,
he keeps weaving what he cannot create. He is neither as
naturalistic as Milton Stern sees him,12 nor as integrated

as Robert Zoellner implies.13

As Zoellner perceives, his
philosophy is basically cyclical, but to stress the
optimistic part of it creates a distortion of his person-
ality. The Optimistic part of his cycle is no more true
than the pessimistic part: the truth lies somewhere
between.

When Ishmael comes up with absolute answers, he
is not being his most honest, but is trying to avoid
psychological destruction. But Ishmael will recurrently
return to a less didactic philosophy, one that encompasses
both madness and the artificial fire where blubber is

melted to oil and laughter forks through flame:

Oh, grassy glades! Oh, ever vernal endless
landscapes in the soul; in ye -- though long

184

parched by the dead drought of the earthly
life, -- in ye, men yet may roll, like young
horses in new morning clover; and for some
fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the

life immortal on them. Would to God these
blessed calms would last. But the mingled,
mingling threads of life are woven by warp

and woof; calms crossed by storms, a storm

for every calm. There is no steady unretracing
progress in this life; we do not advance
through fixed gradations, and at the last one
pause. . . .But once gone through, we trace the
round again; and are infants, boys, and men,
and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor,
whence we unmoor no more? (pp. 623-4).

At the end of his narration Ishmael has included more in

his circle of experience than before it. Moby-Dick ends

 

with Ishmael neither resolved nor in permanent stasis,

but resting so that he may at a later time continue his
journey toward reality. Ishmael has not been saved by
his visions, his wisdom, his learned ability to love, but
by serendipity, by being at the right place at the right
time, by being at the still-point of a vortex that happens
to contain a life-buoy/coffin that he has neither formed
nor carved.

In Moby-Dick, Melville has brilliantly studied

 

different human solutions and has avoided sanctioning any.
He has explored rather than judged, and he has honestly
studied parts of himself and of the creative process. In

Moby-Dick, Melville achieved a grandness unprecedented by

 

him. Melville had successfully surpassed himself.

NOTES -- SECTION III

1Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life
of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, II (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1951), p. 529.

 

 

 

 

2Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A_Reading
of Moby-Dick (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973)! p- 9.

 

 

3Zoellner, p. 145.

4Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Fiedelson,
Jr. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964), p. 410. All
subsequent references to this edition will be internally
documented.

 

5See page 36 of my dissertation for an analysis of
the implications of Melville's response, and how it relates
to his fear of reality testing.

6Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The
Struggle Toward Self-Realization (New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 1950), p. 196.

 

 

 

 

7Horney, p. 196.
8
Horney, p. 196.

9Milton R. Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman
Melville (Urbana: University of Illionis, 1957), pp. 1-29.

 

10See my section on'TmageryP

11Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: C cle
and Epigycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 5 ),
p. 91.

 

 

185

186

12Stern, pp. 242-4.

13Zoellner, p. 212; p. 145; p. 9.

SECTION IV

CONCLUSION:
MELVILLE'S CREATIVE RESISTANCE OF ABSOLUTES

In this study I have related the major relation-
ships in Herman Melville's life to the imagery and
characterization of Moby-Dick. I have demonstrated that
while Melville's personal relationships were doomed
because of his inability to fully trust another human
being, he avoided the strain of absolutism, the need for
exact definition, in creating the imagery and character-

ization of Moby-Dick.

 

Donald Hall, in his astute study of poetry's
connection to poets,discusses the enrichment that emanates
from studying a person's life in relation to his work:

Domesticity precedes ideology, for all men and
women. The feelings between parents and children,
siblings, men and women as lovers or as spouses --
these relationships penetrate the life of genius
as much as they penetrate the lives of the rest of
humanity. To insist on the primacy of the family
affair is neither to denigrate nor to reduce the
poem or the idea. . . .I do not say that when we
read his poems we should derive his life from them;
I do say that when we read his poems, we must be
conscious that they are 'personal' as well as
historical or doctrinal, or we do not read them.

What Donald Hall says about T. S. Eliot's poetry is true
for Moby-Dick. The major personal relationships of Herman
Melville's life colored the type of images and characters

187

188

within this work. While forming direct connections

between relationships in Melville's life and in Moby-Dick

 

distorts, forming correspondences enriches. In this
dissertation I have attempted to intuit rather than
project; I have attempted to explore rather than define.

The Melville I discovered was a student of nature,
one who was interested not only in what people do, but
also in what they are. His characters reflect his in-
volvement with finding an order that portrays life's
variable gradations. Melville's relationship with
Nathaniel Hawthorne encouraged this study of life, but it
did not resolve his sense of uncomforting mobility. His
characters reflect different aspects of his search. Each
character's solution has its own dangers, its own limit-
ations; each character's voyage brings him back upon
himself.

Melville critics have attempted to connect the

imagery and characterization in Moby-Dick, for Melville

 

was also interested in the nature of objects: his use<xfthe
circle and line was as complex, as variable, as his study
of human nature. But these critics have attempted to

make their connections absolute. In John Seelye's
diagrammatic analysis, for instance, he associates the

line with Ahab because of the monomaniacal structure of

Ahab's quest and the circle with Ishmael because of

189

Ishmael's relativisitc, reiterative sensibility.2 Robert
Zoellner, on the other hand, has made exactly opposite
connections: he associates Ahab with images of roundness,
specifically the doubloon, and Ishmael with images of
linearity, because he believes that Ishmael is objective:

. . .Ishmael never, even in the"Whiteness'
chapter, employs the metaphor of the mirror in
the absolute sense that Ahab uses it in the
'Doubloon' scene. Ahab sees a hopelessly
circular solipsism in the total reflectivity
of the doubloon-microcosm, and the varying
interpretations of the coin given by the six
percipients who follow him appear to reinforce
this view. But Ishmael, while he faithfully
reports all that is said in this scene,
including what Stubb-as-observer reports, does
not himself comment upon the doubloon in any
but the most objective terms. The 'Doubloon'
chapter belongs to Ahab, not Ishmael. The
solipsism implicit in it is thereforeAhab's
not Ishmael's.3

But Ishmael is not simply objective, not simply linear.
He speaks of the doubloon as "immaculate" even though it
is nailed amidst iron and bolts. He is impressed by its
stability: "every sunrise found the doubloon where the
sunset left it last." When he mentions that it comes
from the Republic of Ecuador, he is quite aware that
Ecuador is the central country of the world.4 The rich-

ness of Moby-Dick lies in the fact that no character is

 

strictly tied to either the line or circle. Nor are the
line or circle separate: they bifurcate one another and

melt into one another.

190

Moby-Dick seems motivated by Melville's desire to

 

present a world that may be limited in terms of individual
character's views, but these views have the richness of
variation, and they, when taken simultaneously, form a
gestalt which is more than the sum of its individual parts.
Each character is a point that can extend into a line, or
curve into a circle; no one person can comprehend the
whole. Each character is both creator and created.

Moby-Dick is a startling dance, a moveable ever-

 

changing work of art. Radii proceed from the center, and
yet when taken collectively form a circumference. The
"Grand Armada" chapter's movement demonstrates this in
physical terms. Each point, each whale, has its double
generating quality: it can circle and it can cut. Through

Moby-Dick,Melville apprehends time and space. The voyage

 

progresses and turns on itself: Ishmael begins and ends
his journey alone. For Melville, the world is an infinite
circle whose center is everywhere and whose extension lies
beyond human ken. Melville studies his vision through the
actions of both character and object. He explores his own
consciousness and the variety of his own needs, and yet
creates a world that the reader can enter and explore.

Melville moves from order to anarchy and back to
order again. The reader experiences a scattered totality
as rich as life itself, a totality which can be broken

and reformed but which cannot be successfully defined.

191

Circles beget circles, ideas, ideas, and the reader is
left to ponder, to experience, to analyze, to reject his
definitions, and to begin again.

Moby-Dick is a finely textured work protraying

 

Melville at his strongest, at his creatively most honest.
He has Ishmael verbalize Melville's own fear that the
complexities of his novel will somehow be incomprehensible:
"but how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet in
some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all

these chapters might be naught" (p. 253). Neither Ishmael
nor Melville need worry. Through all the dimness, through
all the random complexity, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
and the reader imaginatively follows Melville through

the magical world of Moby-Dick.

 

NOTES -- SECTION IV

lDonald Hall, Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and
Opinions (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977),
pp. 102-3.

 

 

2John Seelye, Melville: The Ironic Diagram
(Evanston: Northwestern UniverSity Press, 1970), pp. 6-7;
pp. 60-73.

 

3Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A_Reading
g: Moby-Dick (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973), p. 25.

 

 

4Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Fiedelson,
Jr. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964): PP. 549-550.
All subsequent references to this edition will be inter-
nally documented.

 

192

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