Patterns Of Initiation In Moby Dick Herman Melville

ARGUMENT

As a quest epic, “Moby Dick” is Melville’s most ambitious novel, and his most challenging. As such, it requires the most careful and responsive reading imaginable. For a clear apprehension of the intricacy and depth of Melville’s story, of the rewards and dangers, the subtle ins and outs of the quest, one is likely to need a guide, as Ishmael did when he undertook his first whaling voyage in the company of Queequeg. This book is intended as such a guide.

I have chosen Melville’s “Moby dick” because it may be the greatest novel ever written by an American; and setting aside the great white whale itself, there are the characters, that one cannot ignore when reading their journey and initiation on sea. Captain Ahab, skipper of the doomed ship, Ishmael the narrator and hero, may be the most compelling characters Melville ever created. This novel is among other things, a sublime effort to plumb the tragic implications of man’s relationship to nature. It dramatizes with extraordinary power a humanist vision transcending racial differences and national boundaries. And it widens into the most provocative study of man’s relationship to God ever written by an American novelist. With Captain Ahab, we have Melville’s idea of the American tragic hero par excellence. We also came to know Ishmael, the symbol of courage, that quit the life on land in search of a goal, of something to worth living beyond boundaries of daily life.

In view of the theme that mutually concern us here – the formation of the self, the status of roles, and the self relationship to the social order. It is worth exploring what Melville understood tragic experience to be and how he embodies his understanding in a remarkable Promethean figure, Captain Ahab.

Moby Dick is, among other things, an encyclopedia of cetological lore having to do with every aspect of the whale – the scientific, zoological, oceanographic, mythic, and philological. And it recounts Ishmael’s slow recovery from melancholia, principally through his developing friendship with the Polynesian harpooner Queequeg. These thematic elements are interspersed with chapters detailing Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the whale from the Atlantic into the South Pacific Ocean. In the course of the long voyage they meet nine other ships and conduct nine gains, or meetings, with them. But the pleasure implicit in such meetings is lost to the men, as Ahab wants only information about the whereabouts of Moby Dick. All civilities and pleasures are dispensed with, as Ahab gives his razor away and even throws his pipe overboard.

It is a mountainous book about the sea, an American book of revelation. It represents a world, or worlds, that may be interpreted to infinite degrees, and have been. It has been made into film, into opera, and into a major Laurie Anderson performance piece. It has been borrowed by all forms of popular culture so ubiquitously that its characters are a shorthand for specific forms of madness, a fit echoing of Melville’s own use of master Shakespeare’s characters.

It is, in other words, a great temptation, a book to be reckoned with anyone who wants to think about American experience. One has his own temptation when it comes to “Moby Dick”. The reader is introduced the desire for a vocation: Ishmael goes to sea in a direct attempt to shake off one self and to assume another through the vocational acceptance of a calling. The story that is his to tell, is the story of his acceptance of the vocation of sea-man, of sojourner to the sea.

Among the curiosities of this book, the place of Ishmael as a witnessing narrator is especially curious. First, there is the question of Melville’s authorial license – he seems to place Ishmael as a witness to crucial scenes throughout the novel, allows him to hear the spoken thoughts of others characters, and making him a seemingly constant presence at the key turns of plot and conversation.

CHAPTER ONE

Herman Melville – the author.

I.1.Early working life

Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a "boy" (a green hand) on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. “ Redburn: His First Voyage” (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.

The three years after Albany Academy (1837 to 1840) were mostly occupied with teaching school, except for the voyage to Liverpool in 1839. From 1838 to 1847, he resided at what is now known as the Herman Melville House in Lansingburgh, New York. Near the end of 1840 he once again decided to sign ship's articles. On January 3, 1841, he sailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts on the whaler Acushnet, which was bound for the Pacific Ocean. He was later to comment that his life began that day. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. Melville left little direct information about the events of this 18-month cruise, although his whaling romance, “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale”, probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet. Melville deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in July 1842. For three weeks he lived among the Typee natives, who were called cannibals by the two other tribal groups on the island—though they treated Melville very well. “ Typee”, Melville's first novel, describes a brief love affair with a beautiful native girl, Fayaway, who generally "wore the garb of Eden" and came to epitomize the guileless noble savage in the popular imagination.

Melville did not seem to be concerned about repercussions from his desertion from the “Acushnet”. He boarded an Australian whaleship, the “Lucy Ann”, bound for Tahiti; took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in the native "Calabooza Beretanee". After release he spent several months as beachcomber and island rover (Omoo in Tahitian) eventually crossing over to Moorea. He then signed articles on yet another whaler for a six-month cruise (November 1842 − April 1843) and left that ship in Honolulu. While in Hawaii he became a controversial figure for his vehement opposition to the activities of Christian missionaries seeking to convert the native population. After working as a clerk for four months, he joined the crew of the frigate USS United States, which reached Boston in October 1844. These experiences were described in “Typee”, “Omoo”, and “White-Jacket”, which were published as novels mainly because few believed their veracity.

Melville completed “Typee” in the summer of 1845, though he had difficulty getting it published. It was eventually published in 1846 in London, where it became an overnight bestseller. The Boston publisher subsequently accepted “Omoo” sight unseen. “Typee” and “Omoo” gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper". The novels, however, did not generate enough royalties for him to live on. “Omoo” was not as colorful as “Typee”, and readers began to realize Melville was not just producing adventure stories. “Redburn” and White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers. Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.

Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until later in life. After the Civil War, he published “Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War”, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later. Again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative “Clarel”, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. Among the longest single poems in American literature, “Clarel”, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut"—in other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years

Having published nine novels and some fifteen tales and sketches in only eleven years, story goes, Melville was written out by the time he finished “The Confidence-Man”(1857) and could not even fulfill the requests of magazine editors for short pieces of prose. The next 30 years he spent out of the public eye, traveling occasionally to relieve his bouts of despondency, looking for nonliterary ways to support his family, and writing what is often called “nothing but poetry”, which is to say, nothing much. Then, shortly before his death, in 1891, the creativity lamp flared one last time in “Billy Budd”, whose prose, although rusty from disuse, marks the novelist’s triumphant return, after long silence, to his natural literary medium.

This familiar construction of the author called “Melville” selects its own supporting data. His first collection of poems, drawn from his Mediterranean travels in the winter of 1856-1857, failed to find a publisher. His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view. A leading champion of Melville's claims as a great American poet was the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who issued a selection of Melville's poetry prefaced by an admiring and acute critical essay. According to Melville scholar Elizabeth Renker "a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient." In reference to the poem “Clarel”, poetry critic Helen Vendler remarked: "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'".

Melville spent years writing a 16,000-line epic poem, Clarel, inspired by his earlier trip to the Holy Land. His uncle, Peter Gansevoort, by a bequest, paid for the publication of the massive epic in 1876. But the publication failed miserably, and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to afford to buy them at cost.

As his professional fortunes waned, Melville's marriage was unhappy. Elizabeth's relatives repeatedly urged her to leave him, and offered to have him committed as insane, but she refused. In 1867, his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally. While Melville worked, his wife managed to wean him off alcohol, and he no longer showed signs of agitation or insanity. But recurring depression was added to by the death of his second son, Stanwix, in San Francisco early in 1886. Melville retired in 1886, after several of his wife's relatives died and left the couple legacies that Mrs. Melville administered with skill and good fortune.

As English readers, pursuing the vogue for sea stories represented by such writers as G. A. Henty, rediscovered Melville's novels, he experienced a modest revival of popularity in England, though not in the United States. Once more he took up his pen, writing a series of poems with prose head notes inspired by his early experiences at sea. He published them in two collections, each issued in a tiny edition of 25 copies for his relatives and friends: “John Marr” (1888) and “Timoleon” (1891).

One of these poems further intrigued him, and he began to rework the headnote to turn it into first a short story and then a novella. He worked on it on and off for several years, but when he died in September 1891, he left the piece unfinished, and not until the literary scholar Raymond Weaver published it in 1924 did the book – which is now known as “Billy Budd, Sailor” – come to light.

Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, age 72. The doctor listed "cnd, though not in the United States. Once more he took up his pen, writing a series of poems with prose head notes inspired by his early experiences at sea. He published them in two collections, each issued in a tiny edition of 25 copies for his relatives and friends: “John Marr” (1888) and “Timoleon” (1891).

One of these poems further intrigued him, and he began to rework the headnote to turn it into first a short story and then a novella. He worked on it on and off for several years, but when he died in September 1891, he left the piece unfinished, and not until the literary scholar Raymond Weaver published it in 1924 did the book – which is now known as “Billy Budd, Sailor” – come to light.

Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. A common story says that his New York Times obituary called him "Henry Melville", implying that he was unknown and unappreciated at his time of death, but the story is not true.

From about age 35, Melville ceased to be popular with a broad audience because of his increasingly philosophical, political and experimental tendencies. His novella Billy Budd, Sailor, unpublished until 33 years after the author's death, was later turned into a play, an opera by Benjamin Britten and a film by Peter Ustinov.

In “Herman Melville's Religious Journey”, Walter Donald Kring detailed his discovery of letters indicating that Melville had been a member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Until this revelation, little had been known of his religious affiliation. Hershel Parker in the second volume of his biography makes it clear that Melville became a nominal member only to placate his wife. Melville despised Unitarianism and its associated "ism", Utilitarianism. (The great English Unitarians were Utilitarians.) See the 2006 Norton Critical Edition of “The Confidence-Man” for more detail on Melville and religion than in Parker's 2002 volume.

I.2. “Moby Dick” in the American Literature

At the end of his famous review, written in the late summer of 1985 while composing “Moby Dick”, Melville predicted that Hawthorne’s “Mosses from an Old Manse” would be regarded as his masterpiece. Thus, he explained , “there is a sure, though a secret sign in some works which prove the culmination of the powers (only the developable ones, however) that produced them”. It is unclear whether Melville had read any of Hawthorne ‘s other works . Still unacquainted with the man himself, he apparently did not know that Hawthorne had published “The Scarlet Letter” earlier that same year. Even so, Melville had the good sense to hedge his bets by adding that he hoped the older writer would yet prove his prediction wrong.

What is remarkable about this rather droll version of Emersonian philosophy is that it captures the same convictions regarding the potency of transcendent powers, the same conception of life, even the same theory of art that Melville was then trying to infuse into his own masterwork. The calling forth of wondrous, occult properties, that rare but happy accident in the life of humankind, is the central subject of Melville’s great story. In its most heightened form, it is also the subject of the worlds great modern epics, particularly spiritual epics, such as the “Divine Comedy” and “Paradise Lost”, that tell the story of a hero who makes a life transforming journey into the deepest realms of the self and back out again.

Since 1950, when Newton Arvin and Henry F. Pommer first examined the matter in some detail, many critics have gone on record as calling “Moby-Dick” an epic or acknowledging it has significant ties with the epic tradition. But there have also been many who have questioned such a designation and argued instead for the influence of some other genre, particularly tragedy, romance, or anatomy, or some heterogeneous combination of genres. Even some who advocate reading the book as an epic, such as Arvinor, more recently, John P. McWilliams, have expressed reservations about the term or claimed the book finally eludes generic classification. Clearly, Melville’s critics are far from agreement on the matter, despite the fact that it is one of the most analyzed texts in all of American literature. Even among critics who are predisposed to see the book as an epic, there is some disagreement about the qualities that make it so.

While much of the discussion centers on Ahab and the ancient epic of combat, the principal point of focus throughout is on Moby-Dick as a spiritual epic. The later tradition envelopes the earlier one, as Ishmael’s story envelopes Ahab’s. As more and more critics in the twentieth century have testified, this is Ishmael’s story more than Ahab’s, important as Ahab’s is, and so the parallels with the spiritual epic are more pervasive, and more profound, than the parallels with the primitive epic of physical courage.

Moreover, given Melville’s symbolic technique, which is an epic work is designed to infuse the quotidian world with significance and elevate mundane matters to the supernatural plane, the theme of the quest for the soul takes on an overriding importance. The ancient epics, too, of course had a spiritual dimension in that they were intended to explain the intrusion of the gods into the affairs of humankind; they were, as Arthur Hutson and Patricia McCoy, among others, have said, concerned in a fundamental way with mythology. But, beginning with Dante, the epic became essentially inward, and not simply psychological but spiritual, centering on the search for the soul or the soul’s salvation.

As an epic of the universal story of mankind, therefore, “Moby Dick” is more than a local instance of mythmaking or nation-building, comparable for its time and place with the “Odyssey” of ancient Greece or the “Aeneid” of early Rome. It is also Melville’s attempt to show that the powers behind the great spiritual epics of the world are the same powers that propelled its major religious mythologies – Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Egyptian, among others Melville knew quite thoroughly – and that they were as alive in his own day as they had been in those earlier times.

However, for understanding Melville’s conception on the epic journey or quest in particular is even more deeply indebted to the work of several modern students of psychology, religion, and myth, especially C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, who define life, and the quest, in terms of spiritual awakening and otherwise explore, from modern, broadly psychological point of view, the gap between the seen and unseen, the known and the unknown worlds.

There is a very developed view of history, society and politics in Moby Dick, one that has heretofore attracted attention but which has never, as yet, been elaborated in its entirety. Moby Dick is about the self- destruction of the bourgeois ego. This term is chosen reluctantly, because the English language provides no better equivalent of what in French might be called the "moi absolu" or the "absolu littéraire", or what could be extracted from German Idealist philosophy (above all the work of Fichte and Schelling) as "das absolute Ich". As a critique of the limits of the bourgeois ego, a novel composed against the backdrop of the 1840's in America is necessarily a critique of Transcendentalism. The term "bourgeois ego" unfortunately does not capture fully the thrust of Melville's diagnosis, insofar as it limits Melville's vision to modern capitalist society. Melville is writing about that society, undoubtedly. But he is also writing about the West and the West's relationship with non-Western peoples in an historical sweep which encompasses and transcends the latter, bourgeois phase of Western history. The Biblical figure of Ahab, and the constant invocation of the Old Testament, in the context of a world-historical "comparative mythology" , makes this obvious. Melville clearly sees the figure of Ahab as the culmination of a tradition whose origins well antedate modern capitalist society, even though much of our discussion linking Moby Dick to the American social scene of the mid-19th century will focus on two sources of Ahab's character that are modern and bourgeois: 17th century Puritanism and Calvinism, and 17th and 18th century liberalism, as it shaped the American experience.

Not accidentally the more expressive French and particularly German terms better capture the overtones of what is meant by the "bourgeois ego", because New England Transcendentalism derived directly from several decades of German philosophical and aesthetic influence in the United States, above all through the work of Kant and Coleridge, who was deeply influenced by Kant's aesthetics. Van Wyck Brooks captures the mood of the late 1830's in which young minds were, in Melville's phrase from White-Jacket, "turned by the Germans":

"In short, the more sensitive minds of the younger generation, the imaginative, the impressionable, the perceptive, those who characterize a generation–for the practical people never change, except in the cut of their clothes– were thoroughly disaffected. The shape of the outward world had ceased to please them. The Fourth of July orations had ceased to convince them that "freedom" had any connection with religious feeling. The aristocrats of trade were essentially vulgar, the "rational" Unitarians were materialistic. The young people were radicals and mystics."

Nor can there by any doubt that it is such people that Melville has in mind in his own parallel evolution to Marx's critique of the Young Hegelians. The three major characters of Melville's early sea-faring novels, Redburn, White Jacket and Ishmael, can all be described to one extent or another as "transcendental divines", to use Melville's phrase from the passage in White-Jacket quoted earlier. Moby Dick, in particular, is filled with references to the contemporary philosophical ferment.

"…but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth, by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature… But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or

hand an inch; slip your hold at all, and your identity comes back in horror. Over Cartesian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"

Ahab is of course no pantheist. But he too is a metaphysician, and his metaphysics, while difficult to pinpoint to any particular philosophical doctrine, have some very "Kantian" overtones, with the visible world relegated to the phenomenal appearance, behind which there is an unknowing "thing- in- itself"; Ahab, who leaves a "white and turbid wake" of abstraction wherever he sails, has this to say about what drives him:

"…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 feature 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. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

The romantic journey of initiation is in fact a voyage of symbolic, and indeed Symbolist, decipherment, invoking the reciprocity of mind and external world, a reprocity predicted ultimately on the founding analogy between the creativity of the poet and the Universal or Absolute.

The journey in “Moby Dick” offers a memorable image of this evolution. Like Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Melville’s captain Ahab is driven by the compulsive fascination of mysterious depths; his crusades of vengeance against Moby Dick, evinces the same initiatic fascination that haunts the idealist mind and the Romantic heart of the nineteenth century. Ahab too yearns to penetrate the enigma of the great All, stabbing through the masks of appearance so as to pierce the metaphysical principle, which, mythically he identifies with the great white whale. But the ultimate secret in this novel appears unseizable, irreducible to even the most Promethean desire. The quest-journey ends not in metaphysical initiation, but in a catastrophe from which only the narrator Ishmael escapes, thanks to his reflective elaboration of an existential wisdom allowing accommodation to the residually enigmatic human condition.

Significantly, the maritime journey presented in “Moby Dick” is not simple: it is a dual or double; in the image of the dedoublement Melville operates in exploring the transcendental psyche and its now somber dreams of the Absolute. On the other hand, the whaling trip of the Pequod is the story of the dynamic pursuit-myth focused in the person of Ahab and in the crew he forges in the likeness of his crazed obsession. The coherence of this inner-directed journey is precisely that of a perpetually renewed critical curiosity about the dream life of psyche deep and dark. It passes through all reflection on the inner sea of the human soul: nostalgias and aspiration before the ocean; demonism and madness in the protagonist; superstitions of the crew; religious and spiritual forms; dream, waking reveries and hallucinatory fascinations; the archaic foundations of consciousness and man’s primitive “horror” of the hidden mystery of things.

The whaling voyage is, in fact, the fictional vehicle which accommodates and sustains this essential counterpoint between the dream of the Romantic soul and its self- conscious, self-questioning reflection.

The reciprocity of these two journeys and the nature of their difference is suggested by Ahab’s concluding words in the remarkable scene which sets him in brooding tete-a-tete with the severed and sphinx-like whale’s head suspended from the mast of the Pequod: “O Nature and O Soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are you linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs he lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind”.

Ahab speaks here out of the idealist persuasion that mind and world answer each other in direct reciprocity or correspondence.

I.3. The composition of “Moby Dick”

The “two Moby-Dicks” culminates a history of investigation frequently marked by brilliant literary scholarship. From the time the book was revived in 1919 until 1939, it was assumed that “Moby Dick” was a seriatim composition begun in February 1850, and completed in autumn 1851. This assumption was first questioned by Leon Howard in a paper delivered to the MLA convention in New Orleans in 1939. On the basis of the slight evidence then available he inferred that there may have been a major revision of the novel after August 1950, when the manuscript was described as “mostly done”. This inference was later supported by the discovery of letters in which Melville described the stages of composition of the early narrative. In 1947 Charles Olson in “Call me Ishmael” (New York, p.35) announced, “Moby Dick” was two books written between February 1850, and August, 1851.

The first book did not contain Ahab. But the two works that were to settle matters were still to be written. Leon Howard returned to the topic in his biography Herman Melville (Berkley, California, 1951, 150-179), and in his chapter “Second Growth” he described Melville’s inspirational revision of the early whaling narrative as under the tutelage of Shakespeare and Hawthorne he began philosophically and historically to reshape his “whaling voyage”

Steward’s “The Two Moby-Dicks” is the only study that has been solely devoted to the problem of composition. Leo Howard was primarily interested in Melville’s intellectual growth; Howard P. Vincent was concerned with the cytological genesis of the novel; and Charles Olson offered an impressionistic prose poem inspired by the book.

There are letters that describe the narrative during its various stages of writing, chapters that are datable through external reference, and source materials that are both identifiable and datable. This evidence indicates that there were not just two, but three defined periods in the writing of Moby Dick:

The writing of an early whaling novel begun in February, 1850, and “mostly done” by August of the same year.

A period from August, 1850, until early in 1851 when Melville was writing cetological chapters and perhaps interpolating adventure chapters into the narrative.

A final period, when, under the influence of Shakespeare and Hawthorne, Melville was revising the early narrative; this period extended from early 1851 until the publication of the book in the fall of the year.

The progress Melville made on the whaling story that he began in February, 1850, can be followed though three letters written between May and August.

Moby-Dick contains large sections—most of them narrated by Ishmael—that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot but describe aspects of the whaling business. Although there had been a successful earlier novel about Nantucket whalers, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835) by Joseph C. Hart., which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most accounts of whaling tended to be sensational tales of bloody mutiny, and Melville believed that no book up to that time had portrayed the whaling industry in as fascinating or immediate a way as he had experienced it. Early Romantics also proposed that fiction was the exemplary way to describe and record history, so Melville wanted to craft something educational and definitive. Despite his own interest in the subject, Melville struggled with composition, writing to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850:

“About the ‘whaling voyage’ – I am half way in the work, & am very glad that you suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy…Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this”

Two months later he wrote to his English publisher Richard Bentley offering the work for publication in the fall and describing it as “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooner”.

The theory that this narrative was substantially revised is founded in large part of the testimony of these letters. They describe the consistent progress of the narrative.

Melville’s description of the story lends support to this theory, for nowhere is Ahab or Moby Dick mentioned in his letters; rather he describes it in more general terms as a romantic but truthful “whaling voyage”.

Evert Duyckinck’s unique position as the only person known to have read the early story is significant in that he also reviewed Moby Dick in the “Literary World”(November 22, 1851). In the review he observed, “there are evidently two if not three books in Moby Dick rolled into one”

For Melville the final stage of composition was something of an emotional roller-coaster ride. By the early months of 1851 his good humor passed: he resents intrusions upon his time and becomes irritable with Duyckinck. He then turns to Hawthorne to share his thoughts with his famous neighbor. His letters begin to reverberate with a fresh vigor and renewed energy. The voice and the attitude they reflect Ahab’s, the statements are very much those of Shakespeare and Carlyle. Melville’s mounting excitement continues throughout the spring and summer months, tempered only by his critical reflection that what he had produced was a “final hash”

The final period of composition seems to have focused on Ahab as a tragic hero rather than simply the captain of an ill-fated vessel. In Melville’s letters Ahab’s language, attitude, and dark metaphysical questioning are echoed throughout. The increased excitement and the flow of ideas in the letters indicate that for Melville these were months of great creativity. The notion inherent in “Howthorne and His Mosses”, of a character, who, like Shakespeare’s dark heroes, would examine what we feel to be terrible true – this idea seems to have waited until early 1851 to find expression in Melville’s dramatic presentation of Ahab.

Those sections in “Moby-Dick” that have been associated with the original narrative – I-22 and 60-92 – evince only minimal Shakespearean influence. The influence occurs in chapters 23-59 and 93-“Epilogue”, but even within these chapters certain ones demonstrate considerably stronger influence. This is evident when they are examined separately.

CHAPTER TWO

Patterns of initiations in “Moby Dick”

II.1. The meaning of Myth

Myth comes via mythos from the Greek, meaning to make a sound with the mouth and is thus basic to human existence as we know it: “in the beginning was the Word”. To the orthodox believer what we call myth is the word of God – the metaphorical, symbolical, or direct expression of the “unknown”: “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.

If we put aside the commonplace definition of myth as story with no basis in fact, we will have made a necessary first step toward a meaningful definition of our subject. The next step involves the choice of a path. Much has been done – especially through the psychological approach – to make myth relevant to modern people. Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo) applied the principles of psychoanalysis to myth and found parallels between myth and neurosis. He and others – Norman O. Brown, for example – have done a great deal with the connection between language and myth as they relate to human psychology.

In a sense, all mythic events are initiatory. The events of monomyth , are meant to be final. They are isolated to be studied before being released into the cosmic flow which is their natural habit.

The journey of life is the search for the self – for the personal myth which is veiled in the local and the immediate but which, on a deeper level, is but an expression of the world myth. One must go with the hero through his rites and passage. We must lose ourselves to find ourselves in the overall pattern of the cosmos.

In “Moby Dick”, Melville took as his province man’s relation to the entire universe – whether it be that mysterious conceptual area where man stations his gods, or that most common of his prey, his fellow creatures, or that darkest of underworlds, his own conscious, where he meets himself and is found wanting or afraid. Balance is the key word in this relationship to the universe. The desired balance is psychic, a balance of feeling and judgment, a willingness to actively do one’s part and an avoidance of monomaniacal over-indulgence. The introspective and meditative Ishmael, with the help of Queequeg’s instinct, eventually gains the balance, both a conscious and an instinctual kinship with and a belongingness to the inner and outer mysteries of life. By the end of the book, the mystic-religious lesson in Queequeg’s tattoos, a “complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth”, (Chap.110) has been psychically transferred to Ishmael’s personality. Queequeg teaches Ishmael the lesson in the tattoos, though both of them are unconscious of the lesson and of the act of teaching. Ishmael’s experience with Queequeg figuratively tattoo his soul with the forgotten meaning of the tattoos.

Thus Melville is writing of theology and mythology, of kinship and belongingness, of morality and ethics, of madness and psychological peace. Together, these concerns make up Melville’s religious vision – poor Melville, who, according to Hawthorne, could “neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

Ishmael, that psychic wanderer who is willing to meet himself in the dark, is the player Melville is using to make his positive statement about the religious vision. He intended Ishmael and Queequeg (as, indeed, all the crew) to be foils to Ahab, and his focus is not on them as intensely as it is to Ahab.

Queequeg’s lesson comes in two parts, which correspond to the two phases of meaning which Melville tells us are contained in his tattoos: (1) the mystic art of attaining truth, evaluating experience, and (2) a theory of the heavens and the earth, placing one’s self in the scheme of the universe. Melville was working with several symbols of classic mythology which have been taken over by modern psychologists, so that I think such a psychic interpretation is not inappropriate.

Ishmael, is the only character in the book who succeeds in structuring himself positively. It is Ishmael who is saved, both literally and symbolically, from the catastrophe. His salvation is not defensible as only a necessary narrative expedient, for Melville too often violates the Ishmael point-of-view, as, for instance, in the frequent visits to Ahab’s innermost private mind. Melville could and indeed does, write the book from an omniscient point-of-view with his own consciousness as the controlling force. Ishmael’s journalistic observations do function technically to keep the allegory anchored in reality, but this would not justify salvation.

When we first meet the wandering outcast, Ishmael, he shows a great deal of self-perception. Ishmael has succeeded in making the first big leap outside the self, outside his past experience, outside the moral formula. He is able to see himself and Queequeg from a point of view where justice resides and where judgments are valid. He does precisely the right and positive thing when he removes his beliefs from the “infallible Presbyterian Church” and brings them into his practical life. He applies morality and the Golden Rule to his argument about whether or not to join Queequeg ceremony with his Yojo. His decision is exactly right, as it must be when both from metaphysics and from heart.

One can ask himself: what is the dread in Ishmael’s soul ? Perhaps it is the fear of a nothingness. The Castaway, Pip, finds that “awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my Gog! Who can tell it?”(chap.93). perhaps Ishmael is as close to damnation here as he ever comes, but his meditations begin immediately to save him. He correctly analyzes the projections of the crew on Moby Dick, how rumor is elevated to myth. He understand that the whale is one thing to Ahab: the embodiment of evil.

II.2. Understanding initiation

The phenomenon of initiation is one of the most persistent and ubiquitous aspects of religion. Like religion itself, however, a single definition which can apply to all instances and ramifications has proved very difficult to achieve. The term “initiation” is not a problem, in that it does refer rather clearly to a type of social activity with attendant notions of change. The French use l’initiation to mean any introduction, for example, to a new area of study – but such usage I obviously derivative and nonreligious. The problem seems to lie instead with the multileveled meaning of this type of religious activity and its occurrence in so many cultures and doctrinal contexts.

The argument that puberty initiation effects a social change, and that its regular elements can be so explained, proceeds in this fashion: social equilibrium is endangered by the growing prowess of the young boys.

The prevalence of inadequate criticism employing the concept of initiation suggests that the term requires clarification. The name and analytic concept of the initiation story derive basically from anthropology. The most important rites of most primitive cultures center around the passage from childhood or adolescence to maturity and full membership in adult society. Anthropologists call these rites initiation or puberty ceremonies. These ceremonies involve physical torture, cutting of various parts of the body, abstention from use of food, isolation and indoctrination in secret tribal beliefs.

Certain, “literary anthropologists” propose a concept of initiation apparently based on the idea of propitiating the adult or supernatural world. For example, Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949) describes initiation as a stage in all human life. He derives his description of initiation from the experience of the typical mythical hero as he seeks adjustment and union with the forces of existence. Ritual is difficult to define and to apprehend because most human behavior follows prescribed pattern unreflectively. Everyday patterns of behavior are recognized as ritualistic only when they are so exaggerated or deliberate as to appear out of the ordinary. Therefore, the formalized behavior of so-called civilized people will appear ritualistic in fiction chiefly under two circumstances: when it involves a response to an unusually trying situation in which a person falls back on socially formalized behavior, or when an individual pattern of behavior results from powerful psychological compulsion.

The anthropologist’s ideas about initiation would suggest that an initiation story shows adult society deliberately testing and indoctrinating the young, or shows the young compelled in a relatively universal manner to enact certain experiences in order to achieve maturity. But only a very small proportion of works called initiation stories, or meeting the definitions for them, show adults testing or teaching the young. Ritual does occur in some initiation stories, but it is more often of individual than of social origin.

The various critical definitions of the initiation story fall into two groups. The first group describes initiation as a passage of the young from ignorance about the external world to some vital knowledge. The second describes initiation as an important self-discovery and a resulting adjustment to life or society. According to Adrian H. Jaffe and Virgil Scott initiation occurs when a “character in the course of the story, learns something that he did not know before, and…what he learns is already known to, and shared by, the larger group of the world.” Several critics, including Brooks, Warren and West explicitly define initiation as a discovery of evil. Brooks and Warren also state that the protagonist seeks to come to terms with the discovery, and West suggests that in learning to live with his knowledge the protagonist begins to achieve self-understanding.

Initiation stories obviously center on a variety of experiences and the initiations vary in effect. It will be useful, therefore, to divide initiations into types according to their power and effect. First, some initiations lead only to the threshold of maturity and understanding but do not definitely cross it. Such stories emphasizes the shocking effect of experience, and their protagonists tend to be distinctly young. Second, some initiations take their protagonists across a threshold of maturity and understanding but leave them enmeshed in a struggle for certainty. Third, the most decisive initiations carry their protagonists firmly into maturity and understanding. These initiations usually center on self-discovery.

II.3. Ishmael – the journey

When seen in relation to Moby-Dick, such a scheme, with its emphasis on transformation and the turning toward spiritual self-knowledge, naturally points to Ishmael as the true hero of the book; he alone complete an initiatory test and returns to tell about it.

Ishmael is like a cartographer seeking through simplification, through a model of reality. He enters the free space of the novel to chart the geography of human consciousness. Paul Theroux writes o map-making as drawing “its power from the greatest o man’s gifts – courage, the spirit of inquiry, artistic skill, sense of order and design, his understanding o natural laws, and capacity for singular journeys to the most distant places”. In the novel Ishmael is so involved in the language-making process that he becomes the resonant metaphor of the novel in emblem, idea and body.

Ishmael is a leading key to Melville’a arful art. As Walter Bezanson points out, “there are two Ishmaels, not one”; the character who meets up with Queequeg in New Bredford, signs abroad in Pequod and participates in the hunt and the narrator who has survived to tell the tale. Melville’s Ishmael is by turns serious and jocular, one who is open to experience, laughter and associative wanderings in the inexhaustible realms of ideas, stories and language, as he fulfils his storyteller’s task: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”

Starting with reference to his gloominess, speculative Ishmael is also giving invitingly alert and amusing:

“Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and joly parts in forces – though I cannot tell why this was exactly; 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 that part I did…(p.22)”

Thus all-rounded Ishmael registers not only the interrelated terror and comedy of this initial encounter with Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, their bed-sharing, Queequeg’s “bridegroom clasp” and the peculiar image of “ a cosy loving pair”, but also his fascination with whales and the whale fishery. It matters little that Ishmael seems often to disappear, his character and voice displaced by author Melville, or that he speaks in different tongues. He is after all, a fine narrative convenience, one whose double role as both participant and observer to the whaling adventure is integral to the primary action of the novel, to the act of narration itself. Establishing such a garrulous spokesman, and playing with his shifting dispositions from melancholic voyager to gamesome philosopher and engaging storyteller, Melville accentuates an irresistible sense of wonder. Most important is Ishmael’s readiness for experience combined with an inexhaustible interest in mysteries of nature and humanity. Claiming a whale ship as “my Yale college and my Harvard”, he emphasizes not only Ahab’s deep mysteries but the mysteries of the whale itself, and therefore, of the very idea of the order of things.

His body in the first section of the novel is twisted by the opposition o his self-fashioning(as intellect, poet and humanist) and his basic biological desires for food, warmth and shelter. Rather than a realistic creation, Ishmael becomes more an ideation or an anatomical geography. Each perceptual act in the novel can be located along the horizontal or vertical axis; in its totality, the center of consciousness creates points of reference in the universe at large.

Without a physical record of his experience on a whaling ship or a cabin window looking out in the open sea, Melville creates a suggestive and curious experimental language-making composite of idea and body. Ishmael reawakens Melville’s sense memories of his experience of going “a-whalin”. He imagines a dynamic world surrounding and influencing the constantly changing state of the center of consciousness.

The structure of the novel tests Ishmael, forcing him to experience the world through all the various modes by which a person knows and constructs reality. In each of the chapters, Ishmael/Melville has a specific task at hand – to fully realize the significance of the chapter’s heading. Ishmael’s vision demonstrates the intense effort and flexibility of the mind as it seeks to conceptualize and grasp manifold reality in concrete terms, but the dead ends and loose ends of this picture-making act express the phenomenal power of the human mind to entertain and interchange with death and chaos.

The dual part of the center of consciousness both describes the objective shape of things and evokes the underlying Romantic aesthetic of the novel. In the “Doubloon” chapter, Ishmael sets down the visible face of the coin, yet he exist offstage as an invisible agent of the novel, revealing the rich complexity of feeling, emotion, wisdom, spirit, and vision, blending in the theatrical world of the Pequod. The gold coin nailed on the mainmast of the Pequod serves as a mirror into the objective world of characters. The coin crystallizes Ahab’s mythic heroism, a world of strength and defiance.

In the chapter “Squid”, Ishmael tells of a freak encounter with a giant squid. When Daggoo first sees the white organism, he enthusiastically hails the crew to announce Moby Dick’s breach. Yet, as Ishmael and the others go to strike the white whale, they come to realize that it is something entirely different:

“Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any helpless object within reach. Ni perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life”

Only Ishmael captures in language the strange sensuality of this “chance-like apparition of life”. But within the emerging consciousness of the novel, the squid embodies the innate map of consciousness that organizes our feelings and responses to the world. This map exists before the body; it shapes experience and develops the body’s capacity to learn, to feel pleasure and pain, and to react to the external forces.

Unlike the hero’s steadiness and self control (which denotes a higher degree of initiation), the sleepless torment of Ahab reveals the presence of this thing of insufferable agony. Ahab negates his humanity, his body. His feelings and impressions, his knowledge of the world, are projected out into space away from this strange, originary locus of experience.

The very structure of their respective journey indicates the extent to which something much larger than personal conflict is at stake. Ahab’s is an almost paradigmatic journey of purpose – whether one takes that purpose to be the hunt for the whale that inspires the ship’s owners or the search for revenge that actually motivates Ahab. Ahab is part of the tradition of the secular quest romance, and the structure that corresponds to this tradition is linear and productive: it must conclude in the achievement of the goal, the making of the product, the bringing home of the oil.

Ishmael’s on the other hand, is a journey without apparent goal. It comes about because of a sense of discontent and melancholy but it is directed toward the achievement of anything. He is a kind of picaresque hero, recounting his adventure. Other epic heroes have circulare journeys, of course, such as Ulysses, but the interest in them resides almost exclusively in the nature of the heroic adventures along the way, and return itself, is associated with particular values, domestic and sentimental. Ishmael never comes home, but he does break the line of aggressive intent, and so saves his life.

Ishmael is the human wanderer who is capable of acting for good or evil, capable of swearing love or death. His position in the midst of the action allows his crucial choice between the poles of Queequeq and Ahab. And his complicity asserts Melville’s view that total power is achieved through the suspension of human, fraternal responsibilities: Ahab may be a monomaniac, but it is the crew who make his journey possible. Ishmael’s narrative prior to the departure of the Pequod occupies the first twenty chapters of the novel, and it is during the crucial section that he meets Queequeg. The meeting between them lays the groundwork for Ishmael’s survival of the catastrophe of the ship’s destruction. Ishmael may not always remain faithful to the values expressed in these early chapters, but they remain there as a foundation to which he can return once he has freed himself of the lure of the Ahabian quest.

The Ishmael of the first section is situated for the reader through Melville’s use of two prototypes: the biblical Ishmael and the Greek Narcissus. The opposition between the two in fact suggests a shift from a biblical ethos to a Greek ethos. As the spiritual descendent of the biblical Ishmael, Melville’s hero is a stepson and wanderer. His isolation from family and community leads him to a state of melancholia in which suicide seems the only option. Ishmael as prototype signals a brutal, vengeful biblical world of the fathers in which justice is vengeance and in which moralism and militarism unite to destroy beauty. Ishmael’s response to his melancholic condition is to go to sea, for he feels a strong attraction to the world of water, which he links explicitly to the myth of Narcissus: “And still deeper in 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 the 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.14). As a figure of Ishmael, he is an image of human isolation, but as a figure of Narcissus, he is an image of the desire to overcome that isolation by joining self and other.

As a cultural figure, Narcissus has been taken negatively; he represents an exclusive love of self. For that reason, the Narcissus reference in Moby-dick has been taken as a confirmation of Ishmael’s alleged immaturity, a sign that he is in some sense like Ahab, seeking to control the world and dying in the process. From this point of view, Narcissus is what Ishmael was; but in fact, Narcissus is what Ishmael becomes.

The impact of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Melville was clear in “White Jacket”. That novel is structured around a transformation of the hero that is simultaneously a rebirth. Significantly, the rebirth occurs after the fall or “plunge” into the sea and is accompanied by a kind of surgery, a cutting of the shroud that would otherwise drown White-Jacket. Important echoes of this scene occur in “Moby Dick”, including Queequeg’s “delivery” of Tashtego and Pip’s dives into the sea. But descent and rebirth are of greatest meaning for Ishmael, who begins the novel by plunging into his own unconscious and emerges at the end redeemed by the coffin of Queequeg. Ishmael as Narcissus is a hero of a transformation myth, one who must pass through death in order to achieve new life. There is of course an element of parallel between Ishmael and Ahab, in that each of them gazes into the water and finds a dark other self. But the difference between these selves are enormous. Ahab’s other self is Fedallah, a demonic energy , while Ishmael’s other self is Queequeg, representative of all primitive and colonized cultures. When Ishmael joins with Queequeg, he joins the sundered races of American (and Western) history. Queequeg fulfils Ishmael’s Narcissus identity by leading him to the discovery of the body as a source of pleasure and instruction: Queequeg’s tattooed body is a perfect emblem of his own Narcissus-like, self-contained being.

Ishmael is associated throughout the novel with scene of gazing and meditation; although these always contain an element of danger (the danger of self-absorption that denies reality). The “Mast-Head” is the chapter that most clearly explores meditation and reveals Melville’s complex attitude to it. It is by mounting to the masthead that one can escape from the rigors of the ship and more particularly from the control of the Captain. At the same time the masthead is a figure of total isolation. It appeals to Ishmael, the lonely figure, but not to Queequeg who is always ready to “plunge” into life in order to acknowledge his place in the human community. The appeal of the masthead is the appeal of primitivism; it is the yearning to leave behind the complexities of an unsatisfactory world. Still it can provide the opportunity for friendly exchange that is out of place below ; Ishmael and Queequeg can “lounge” in the rigging. And one cannot take totally serious Ishmael’s justification for vigilance among the men on the masthead: that they must be sure to see the whales or else betray their economic mission. Those jokes about the owners and their interests suggest that Melville is exploring the subversive nature of leisure here: lounging is uneconomic and dangerously self-indulgent. But what concerns him most is the danger of ignoring the reality of evil.

An excellent example of the seductive power of the masthead, and the social reality below it, occurs in chapter 61. Ishmael sways “in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it, in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body…”(p.241). in the instance, since “the resolution” Ishmael has made is his oath to Ahab, it may seem a good thing that he can free himself of that. But his freedom will do little good for a body without a soul. And in any case, his sense of freedom is an illusion: Ahab’s quest goes on, even when Ishmael is dreaming in the mast. A whale is spotted and the crew leaps to attention. The depiction of the whale suggest an analogy with Ishmael: he is “lazily undulating”, reminding Ishmael of “a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon.” But the whale’s meditative state only makes him a better target for the whale hunters. This killing, which is the reader’s first introduction to the reality of whale hunting, is set up in sharp contrast to Ishmael’s dreamy state on the mast. If he is to accomplish any change, he must come down from the mast. Otherwise he is in danger of ending like the whale, killed as he dreams.

II.4. Another “type” of initiation

Ishmael continues to evolve, to gain further initiation in his relation with Queequeg. It is his meeting with Queequeg that changes him permanently. That encounter, presented in mock-romantic terms, is a recognition of the transformative potential of nonaggressive sexuality as manifested in male-bonding. When Ishmael and Queequeg pass their “wedding night” together, they pass beyond the taboos of conventional society in the manner of romantic lovers such as Tristan and Isolda. In Melville’s treatment of the theme, it is necessary for Ishmael to overcome his own prejudices. His ability to share a bed with a cannibal is proof of the power of affection to overcome the prejudices that have been accepted into our own attitudes. Queequeg’s odd appearance and Ishmael’s comically exaggerated fears distinguish this scene from the erotic. Ishmael’s ability to embrace Queequeg, and to overcome his own feelings of fear and disgust, show his worthiness to undertake the journey on the Pequod.

Ishmael and Queequeg occupy a very privileged space; they create their own world that is largely immune to the world outside. Although there are “shadows and phantoms” at the windows, Ishmael finds himself “redeemed” by Queequeg, who can heal his “splintered heart and maddened hand”.(p. 53) . It is clear that it is Queequeg who prevents Ishmael from becoming another Ahab, from using his isolation as the occasion for a bitter search for revenge on the “wolfish world”.

The act of transgression involved in the union of Queequeg and Ishmael is also an act of liberation. By accepting the bed he shares with his cannibal friend, Ishmael faces the forbidden darkness of the unknown (represented in the novel by the story of crawling up the chimney the night of the summer solstice) and realizes that prejudice is based on a fear of the unknown. Ishmael, the Presbyterian is joined to Queequeg the pagan, the New Englander to the South Sea Islander, the white to the dark, the head to the heart and body. Melville’s comic mode of presentation must not divert us from the significance of these scenes; they enact a transformation as complete as can be imagined in which all given values are revealed to be only relative and centered in a particular culture.

The initiation of Ishmael in the marriage ceremony is sealed by smoking Queequeg’s tomahawk pipe. This object is an important sign of transformation; it is once a weapon of war and an instrument of peace. The tomahawk ability to be changed into a peace pipe indicates that things, like people, are not inherently good or evil, but rather contain a potential for both. Evil arises from the uses to which they are put. The tomahawk/pipe also remind us of the multiple ways in which a single reality is perceived and thus is like the whale itself. The use of the tomahawk as signifier indicates Melville’s desire to link the pagan to the North American Indians; his union with Ishmael is in part the reconciliation of a historical divorce caused by white colonization of America. The Indian theme is crucial in “Moby Dick”; we are surrounded by reminders that the American nation has caused the extermination of the Indian nations and that the kind of behavior that caused the extermination continues to prevail against new foes.

For Ishmael, the true hero of Melville’s story, the crucial question is not whether he can contain his anger and vengefulness, but whether he can resist Ahab and the temptation to make Ahab’s feud his own. If he is to have a chance at the epic experience of being swallowed by the whale, he must keep from being swallowed up in Ahab’s rage, as all the others are. For a time, however, Ishmael does succumb. As he says at the opening of “Moby Dick” (chapter 41), after the quarterdeck ceremony wherein Ahab impels his men to join in the hunt of the White Whale, “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs…seemed mine”.

With Ahab now established as the greatest challenge to the well-being of his soul, Ishmael has entered into the second, or “the purification” stage of the hero’s journey, when, as Campbell says, “the senses are cleansed and humbled” and the energies and interests “concentrated upon transcendental things”, as they are in “The Mast-Head”, one of the key chapters in this part of “Moby Dick.” In psychological terms, this is the time when the powerful, ruling images of the hero’s infantile past are finally confronted and defeated, as Ishmael can be seen struggling , throughout the middle three sections of the book, to free himself from Ahab, his domineering “double”. It is an easy step for him, then, when the opportunity to presents itself, to transfer all his psychic turmoil to a powerful figure like Ahab, who promises to redirect toward a single target.

Thus , we can clearly see his evolution, his inner choice to redirect his rage in something that one can “die for”.

Intuitively, Ishmael knows that Ahab will present the greatest trial of his entire journey, and he knows this, from the moment he first lays eyes on him. In “Ahab”(chapter 28), he admits that “foreboding shivers ran over me”. Significantly, he experiences no such fear when he first sights a whale, not even he first sights Moby Dick on the final day of the chase. In the early days of the hunt, Ishmael cannot know that the White Whale will be his salvation. Moby Dick will empower him, by the force and magnitude of its vitalizing effect on his own imagination, to throw Ahab’s rage and resume the course of his own adventure; just as he cannot know that his deeper self will empower him to break the stranglehold of his ego.

The perception that Ishmael is a largely inactive character in “Moby Dick” should not deceive the reader into under-estimating his value both as a narrator and a character: “Ishmael is not simply a narrative device for recording what happens in “Moby Dick”: he is a character . . . no less important than Ahab”. His close involvement allows subjective interest in the narrative, and yet his detachment offers distance, which enables the reader to make a more informed consideration of the story than if Ahab were to offer his own account. In terms of his function, Ishmael is the narrative; his character shapes and has autonomy over it. As Vincent says: “Ishmael is the chorus character whose commentary elucidates and whose person enfolds the entire work. . . [he] is narrator, but he is also prologue and epilogue.”

Thus the narrative, although professing to study Ahab in his hunt for Moby Dick, is a rich study of Ishmael's character. As Lee suggests, the story of Ahab is not the only intended focus of the narrative:

“Before we can allow the Pequod to enter our readerly imaginations as a species of Flying Dutchman, a mythy world-ship launched as in a dream after world-truths, we need Melville's reminder . . . that this journey out is indeed the 'WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL' promised in Chapter I . . . the tale [is a] necessary frame of Moby Dick's larger concerns.”

This “voyage” of Ishmael's could be taken to literally mean his voyage on the Pequod or, as has been suggested, the voyage he embarks upon afterwards, into his memory, in order to create the narrative of “Moby Dick”: “No sooner is one voyage ended, than another, equally unpredictable, begins”.

The narrative is a scholarly study of the Pequod's voyage in particular and whaling in general, making it distinct from traditional adventure stories of this kind.

By extension it could be said “to get to know himself as well”. Vincent has called Ishmael's own mental voyage “the quest of the human heart for its spiritual and psychological home”, which supports the view that the novel has a dual focus – on Ahab's revengeful voyage for Moby Dick, and on Ishmael's scholarly voyage for answers. Making sense of the events which befell the Pequod is imperative to Ishmael, who has made whaling the formative spring of his life: “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” (p. 114). There are several hints in the narrative that Ishmael has been attempting a therapy of sorts for many years, which reaches its climax in the writing of Moby Dick. “The Town-Ho's Story” reveals that the subject has preoccupied him for many years. He explains before recounting the tale: “I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a loving circle of my Spanish friends,” (p. 249). An interruption in his story telling at the Golden Inn comes in the form of questions about Moby Dick. Ishmael's reaction reveals the extent to which past events torture him.

CHAPTER THREE

Conflicts in “Moby Dick”

III.1. Ishmael vs.Ahab

The trauma the whale inflicted on Ahab was patently more than physical. In the delirium of his pain, chagrin, impotence, and outraged sense of fair play, Ahab comes to view his mishap as the unmerited lot of one malevolently predestined to complicity in Adam’s fall. Ahab lived not only for the day of the White Whale’s death; more accurately, he lived only from the day the White Whale dismembered him. In this new awareness, the whale becomes Ahab’s means of confronting the cosmic purposelessness which troubled his creator’s mind as well as his own.

Ahab, however, is capable of emulating Hector in courage as well as in momentary fright of, and flight from, an Achilles-Doom. Of the Pequod’s crew, Ahab alone is free. He alone is resolute and daring to gainsay Family, Duty, Hope, Fate, and Death. It accepts no compromise in facing the terror of life. Melville’s Mariner knows the whale is all-destroying but unconquering; he knows that evil is the equal albeit the opposite of good, and that both are a necessity as well as a condition of life. He knows that life is a series of perpetual cycling of cycles. He agonizes to be convinced of the White Whale’s mortality. The passionate energy with which Ahab plunges into the chase, which the majority of the crew construe as madness, is a measure of his imperative need to silence self-doubts:

“Oh! How valiantly I seek to drive out other’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine! – the Parsee – the Parsee! – gone, gone?” (Chap. 134)

World-order and harmony to which personal freedom is sacrificed are anathema to Ahab. If Evil is absolute and unredeemable, the only posture worthy of man is to stand before it. He must confront it and refuse to compromise.

Like Ahab, Ishmael suffers from a malaise or schism in the soul, an aggression as to prove deadly to himself and others. As Ishmael confesses, it is only by holding to “a strong moral principle” that he can keep himself from “deliberately sleeping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off.” Going to the sea, he says equivocally, “is my substitute for pistol and ball”. Even if he himself is unsure, his unconscious knows there must be a dying to the world before there can be a rebirth. That is the only way one can ever hope to overcome the death of the spirit. For the hero to came back as one reborn, filled with creative energy, as Ishmael does when he returns to tell his tale at the end, he must first give up the world and everything in it.

What distinguish Ishmael from the other more timid mates is simply that he accepts the call to the sea. He does so, to be sure, without full understanding of what he is doing or why, but he is the sort of man ho lives intuitively and knows to trust his inner promptings wherever they might lead him. Because the episodes in his journey represent trials of the spirit, psychological trials, his passage in inward as much as it is across land or water – “into depths where obscure resistances are overcome.”

In “Moby Dick” this inner realm is of course represented by the sea, a universal image of the unconscious, where all the monsters and helping figures of childhood are to be found, along with the many talents and other powers that lie dormant within every adult. Chief among these, in Ishmael’s case, is the complicated image of the whale itself, which is all these things and more and also, serves as the “herald” that calls him to his adventure.

At various times in the land-based chapters of “Moby Dick”, Ishmael shows that he is a fearful man, as well as a man of courage. Whether making his way through the pitch-black streets of New Bredford or facing the prospect of sleeping with a savage, whether contemplating the cenotaphs in the Whaleman’s Chapel or standing helplessly outside Queequeg’s locked room, Ishmael evidences a nervous, morbid imagination. In the chapter titled “Merry Christmas”, when the Pequod is making its way out to sea, Ishmael is given a lesson to this effect, a Christmas present in the form of a swift kick in the pants from captain Peleg, who commands the ship while it is headed out to sea. Ironically, then, even at the start of his quest, Ishmael is offered a “boon”, one of the most valuable to be gleaned from his whole journey. Having stopped in the midst of his sailor duties to worry about the perils of starting the voyage with “such a devil for a pilot” as Peleg, Ishmael feels a “sudden sharp poke in my rear” – a timely warning that he needs to pay attention to his duty and not to his fears. Clearly, this is a lesson Ishmael takes to heart, for he is never kicked a second time, not even in the end, by Moby Dick.

III.2. Ishmael and “The Whale”

Moby Dick contains a large amount of scholarly work on the science of whaling and yet, Ishmael's detailed explanations of many technical aspects of the voyage are often seen as having less value than the chapters specifically addressed to Ahab and Moby Dick. Clearly, though, there is a necessity for the inclusion of such material, which becomes apparent even with a casual reading. Part of the reason, is to demonstrate Ishmael's own obsessive dedication to the pursuit of the whale. To leave it at that misses one of the most important reasons for its inclusion: it facilitates the reader's understanding, enabling a more complete appreciation of the text. As Ward says: “the narrative sections would be nearly incomprehensible without the extensive descriptions of the whale and whaling processes”. In this respect the chapters prepare for the novel's climax: “By the time the Pequod meets Moby Dick . . .the reader has an understanding of the terminology and methods.” In support of such a view, Charles Olson points out, “as the book sweeps to its tragic close in the last thirty chapters, Melville rules out all such exposition.” The “scientific chapters” are vital: “The large accumulation of data serves, does not interfere with, the narrative”. Ishmael is persistently stressing the importance of this information, encouraging the reader to retain as much as possible.

Exploring whales in every conceivable way, Ishmael moves from exterior to interior, from subjective to objective, and form whale to human, enlarging his vision to the breadth of life and the height of metaphysics. In scaling the heights where physical fact and spiritual truth fuse, Ishmael ignores nothing, for in pursuing total knowledge nothing is too small or too large, too insignificant or too obvious. He is determined to capture the whale mot dead but alive, the mystery of life, with his net of science and metaphysics.

Fraternity and cetology might be learned on any whaler, but on the Pequod Ishmael shares the fate of the particular floating community. Within its time-honored hierarchy his position, even as a common sailor, is public. In the sense that no man is an island, no sailor is allowed utter privacy. In this capacity Ishmael becomes a quiet witness to Ahab’s tragedy, viewing it from start to finish and knowing that his own fate depends on the outcome. The tragedy of the Pequod is that she is forced to play a false role. Although her public mission is to fetch oil home to light millions of lamps, she follows her captain’s private vengeance.

At every stage Ishmael is the helpful guide, on occasion seemingly apologetic about the need for such material, yet stating that it “will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted”. Ishmael's much quoted analogy of the narrative to a tree demonstrates that such passages are a natural consequence of his attempt to offer a definitive picture of the sperm whale and his dedicated followers, the whaling ships: “As yet. . . the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life”. To redress this deficiency is partly Ishmael's intention in the creation of Moby Dick. The benefits of such encyclopedic knowledge, despite his assurances, are not always immediately obvious though. This is partly due to the fact that the reader unconsciously applies earlier gained knowledge, and so does not fully appreciate the value of the narrator's efforts; such unwitting application is a testament to his success. The chapter “The Line”, which explains the complex movement of the whale line on the boats is, despite coming at the mid-point of the novel, invaluable when reading of Fedallah's demise during the chase of Moby Dick. This knowledge allows the reader to accept Fedallah's fate as probable and also enables him to read the narrative with the fast pace intended. The detailed presentation of the processes involved in whaling are preparation and also a form of rehearsal for the final confrontation with Moby Dick. Other aspects, particularly those dealing with the treatment of the whale after capture, are conspicuous in that they are destined never to happen to Moby Dick, at least at the hands of the Pequod. Such instances are Ishmael's way of offering an alternative to the fate of the Pequod, in which the White Whale is defeated.

The narrative is given mythical qualities through the inclusion of such hyperbole and superstitious, fabulous stories. Concurrent with this perception of Moby Dick as a mythical narrative is the idea of it being an “epic”, a celebration of every aspect of whaling. Part of this is the relish with which the actual processes of whaling are narrated, as discussed above. Also, whaling images and motifs pervade the text, privileging whaling not just directly through Ishmael's opinions on its value, but also through minor details. One example is Queequeg taking his harpoon to breakfast at the “Spouter Inn” in order to capture his beefsteaks, and another is Father Mapple's pulpit, which is built to mimic a ship's prow. Ishmael's rapturous attention to the smallest detail of the whaling process is a means of elevating the subject. Even the decanting off of oil into barrels is eulogized by him: “Now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part. . . by rehearsing – singing, if I may – the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil”. The whale, the noble object of the whalemen’s pursuit, is offered as a suitably grand subject for an epic: “Of all erections, how few are domed like St Peters! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!” (p. 316). Vincent describes the narrative as “a whaling epic in which the chief actor is. . . a whale”. Ishmael backs up the importance of the whale, stressing its necessity to the epic construction of the novel.

CONCLUSIONS

So “Moby Dick” is a massive experiment in associative narrative construction and, in this sense, Melville’s fondness for allusions is linked with his play with words and concepts. Lasishly evident in such chapters as “The Whiteness of the Whale” and “The Doubloon” in their expansive investigation of the ways in which perspectives operate and meanings are created, it may also be seen in such leaps of imagination. Simultaneously particular and vast, even introducing the ide of other worlds, the imagery is evocative. Like so much of Melville’s writing in “Moby Dick”, it combines the familiar with the strange in ways that constitute the text’s typically strong sense of imaginative engagement. While it depends upon a basic documentary mode of narrative construction, it offers, as well, that striking example of a writer so at play with his ideas and with the language that the “Dear Reader” contract is an invitation to shared voyaging in the realms of the imagination.

Providing variety and diversion within the narrative, the meetings also convey the increasing urgency of Ahab’s monomania while contributing to the developing network of perspectives upon the mysterious white whale itself, and, of course, to that carefully delayed moment when Moby Dick bursts into view to his hunters aboard the Pequod. So caught up with the imaginative possibilities of his grand subject, Melville cast off the limitations of “naturalism” to enter the realm of the symbolic and to explore the compound effects it brings into play.

Psychological penetration and archetypal power are plainly manifest in “Moby Dick”. Melville, as an observer of mankind, often seems a forerunner of depth psychology. Often his probing into personality are in the imagery of a descent to a hidden inner being.

The way in which Melville manipulates the reader's perceptions, a process owing little to chance and a great deal to the author's skill, has been highlighted throughout this dissertation. The blending of styles, the use of differently paced narratives, and above all the character of the narrator Ishmael, are elements of a novel created by a writer aware of what he wants to do, and how best to achieve it. There is a mountain of scholarly criticism on the novel, the majority of which affirms its greatness, and yet Melville did not see Moby Dick in this light. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville speaks of the novel's meaning, its 'soul', struggling free of the “imperfect body”, and he acknowledges his lofty aims in writing the novel, but is only willing to concede partial success in execution. In this perception of his 'failure', however, it is possible to trace a recognition of his own artistic worth:

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.

Despite Melville's views on what he sees as his flawed novel, the only real failure on his part is his inability either to perceive or acknowledge the power, and ultimately the success, of Moby Dick. Some of this may be false modesty, though. In a letter to Sophia Hawthorne he tells her that he had been unaware of any allegorical reading of the “Spirit-Spout” until she pointed it out to him, indicating that like Ishmael, Melville should not always be trusted.

For Melville the need to balance the demands of finance and artistic integrity result in failure, and yet, just as the form of the novel is in the American spirit, as discussed above, so is its creation; commerce is equally as important to the writing of the novel as to the finished novel itself. Obeying the demands of economics in capitalist America makes Melville 'great', as he says in “Hawthorne and his Mosses” : “Great geniuses are parts of the times: they themselves are the times, and possess a correspondent coloring.” In the writing of “Moby Dick”, Melville balances the need for financial success and the more traditional artistic impulse, and in doing so dramatizes the position of American writers of his time.

The novel is not consciously the two novels identified by Olson and others but an evolving whole, transforming from one type of novel into one that is quite different and new, and that is clearly far from a failure.

In concluding with Ahab’s death and Ishmael’s survival, “Moby Dick” provides a sense of balance as well as finality, a hint of inevitability in the scheme of things. Within the framework of the novel this double ending is justified psychologically, morally, and symbolically. But we appreciate this ending not for a resolution it offers but for the complexity of Ishmael’s vision which keeps the Ahab drama in equilibrium. Neither death or survival can replace a genuine resolution, especially in a book which contains great chunks of life itself. This is what made various critics express dissatisfaction with the ending of “Moby Dick”

“Moby Dick” is incomplete as life itself is. But we cannot indulge in such justification merely by way of dismissal. Only by probing this question further can we conclude our reading and begin to understand Melville’s later career, a baffling problem in Melville criticism. It is trough a revived Ahab rather than a surviving Ishmael that Melville resume the search. Or because Moby Dick merges into life, this problem becomes Melville’s rather than Ishmael’s, a problem which Queequeg embodied without understanding and Ishmael left without unfolding, “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth” and “the art of attaining truth.” It is Ishmael’s legacy to his own creator.

Whatever Melville might write in letters to friends, the text of “Moby Dick” demonstrates his perception that things may be what they are perceived to be but something else as well. With his delight in the play of language and meanings everywhere evident in “Moby Dick”, it is a text that concedes the inexhaustible exchange processes of communication. If he has one foot in the Romantic camp, with his readings of Goethe and Coleridge, and Emerson’s reformulations of them for an “American” enterprise.

Intermixed with the Gothic darkness, with that “Calvinistic sense” that he discerns in Hawthorne, Mrlville’s imagination turns so readily to riddling. In Ahab’s words: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks” (p. 140) and, in narrator Ishmael’s language, this perception becomes the disquisition on “whiteness” as both “the visible absence of color” and the “ concrete of all colors”. Against finality, and in deference to the world’s variety, questions continue because Melville’s artful art resists ending.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Philip. "'Leviathan Is a Skein of Networks': Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick." ELH 71.4 (2004);

Becker, John. "The Inscrutable Sublime and the Whiteness of Moby Dick”, Eds. Bloom, Harold and Blake Hobby;

Bernard, Fred V. "The Question of Race in Moby-Dick." Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 43.3 (2002);

Boudreau, Gordon V. "'In the Beginning Was the Word…' Whale '…The Letter…'." Melville Society Extracts 122 (2002);

Bryant, John. "Moby-Dick: Reading, Rewriting, and Editing." Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 9.2 (2007);

Bryant, John, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr. Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick;

Buell, Lawrence. "The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case." American Literary History 20.1-2 (2008);

Cook, Jonathan A. "Moby-Dick, Myth, and Classical Moralism, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 5.1 (2003);

Dagovitz, Alan. "Moby Dick's Hidden Philosopher: A Second Look at Stubb" in Philosophy and Literature Oct 2008;

Faiella, Graham, Moby Dick and the whaling industry of the 19th century; New York : The Rosen Publishing Group, 2004. Cf. Chapter 3, "Moby Dick: The Inspiration";

Hirsch, H. David, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 1963) ;

Marovitz, Sanford E. "Mystical Visions of Mardi and Moby-Dick : The Wondrous New Paintings of A. C. Christodoulou, (2000);

Moby-Dick or The Whale, Northwestern-Newberry edition (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 687.

Myers, H. Alonzo , The Tragic Meaning of Moby Dick , The New England Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Mar., 1942);

Peretz, Eyal. “ Literature and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of 'Moby-Dick'”.( 2002);

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Philip. "'Leviathan Is a Skein of Networks': Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick." ELH 71.4 (2004);

Becker, John. "The Inscrutable Sublime and the Whiteness of Moby Dick”, Eds. Bloom, Harold and Blake Hobby;

Bernard, Fred V. "The Question of Race in Moby-Dick." Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 43.3 (2002);

Boudreau, Gordon V. "'In the Beginning Was the Word…' Whale '…The Letter…'." Melville Society Extracts 122 (2002);

Bryant, John. "Moby-Dick: Reading, Rewriting, and Editing." Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 9.2 (2007);

Bryant, John, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr. Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick;

Buell, Lawrence. "The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case." American Literary History 20.1-2 (2008);

Cook, Jonathan A. "Moby-Dick, Myth, and Classical Moralism, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 5.1 (2003);

Dagovitz, Alan. "Moby Dick's Hidden Philosopher: A Second Look at Stubb" in Philosophy and Literature Oct 2008;

Faiella, Graham, Moby Dick and the whaling industry of the 19th century; New York : The Rosen Publishing Group, 2004. Cf. Chapter 3, "Moby Dick: The Inspiration";

Hirsch, H. David, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 1963) ;

Marovitz, Sanford E. "Mystical Visions of Mardi and Moby-Dick : The Wondrous New Paintings of A. C. Christodoulou, (2000);

Moby-Dick or The Whale, Northwestern-Newberry edition (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 687.

Myers, H. Alonzo , The Tragic Meaning of Moby Dick , The New England Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Mar., 1942);

Peretz, Eyal. “ Literature and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of 'Moby-Dick'”.( 2002);