13 Charity Clarity

Melville carefully cues his readers to allegory, when it appears in his text: “Call me Ishmael.” Note also the person committed to outfitting the ship:

            “Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board…”

Aunt Charity is strongly allegorical, for all live by Charity—every soul on the Pequod (which is the world) entrusts his body’s future welfare to Charity. We are born helpless. Indeed, notions of infancy pervade these chapters, through chapter 22, “Merry Christmas,” which also invokes a helpless babe. Ishmael, during this time, occupies his mind persistently with hapless foreboding. Melville swaddles his novel’s last sight of land in vulnerability.

Because of this, Melville’s embodies his vision of human welfare and glory in Charity. Yet this character fades quickly from our memory as we read the text. Why does she so diminish? Once out to sea, there are no more stays on Captain Ahab—Charity being a last shelter from his maniacal independence. “Surely all this is not without meaning!”

Moby-Dick, a strictly American novel, focuses from this point forward on independence. Despite this cultural identity, however, the story maintains its universality, finding in America a unique example through which to disclose humanity’s wayward nature, a truth at least as old as another nation with which this book is concerned:

            “’Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,

               Stand dressed in living green.

            So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

               While Jordan rolled between.’

            Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.”

Ishmael, significantly, speaks these lines—the not-Isaac; by definition not Israel. This is America too, wayward in its independence yet vulnerable in its infancy. Melville will clarify this contradictory state of humanity in the following chapter. For now, little more needs to be said:

            “…of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds.”

Born in vulnerability and brought up by Charity (an aunt, not a mother), what cause do we have to be independent? Yet liberty obsesses the human mind. The central concern of the novel becomes clear. Melville writes: “…we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.” So the voyage starts—into the ocean deep, into deeply human Truth.

12 The Tomahawk-Pipe

From the chapter “The Prophet:”

            “A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”

Melville concerns himself chiefly with the human being—a wayward soul in a frail body. For the sake of focus, he sets his characters all in a ship on an open sea, like a wooden frame around their human faces. Still, no author builds a frame unless he comprehends the wood. Green nature surrounds us all. Setting his story on the waves allows Melville to distill the complex significance of this fact, and to thus draw drinkable water from a sea of meaning. That water, distilled, tastes as much of land-rain as it does sea-spray.

As discussed in my previous post (11 It’s Not a Race), much of Melville’s analysis of nature involves Queequeg, the cannibal. This post will explore an aspect of nature, in connection with the quote above, that has proven limitlessly useful to my own study of literature.

Queequeg’s most conspicuous accoutrement is his tobacco-pipe. A dangerous tomahawk, with hollowed shaft and metal bowl opposite the blade, Queequeg smokes it continually throughout the book. He smokes it calmly (always calm, is Queequeg) in the hold of the Pequod in the chapter “Going Aboard:”

            “He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe, which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his soul…”

Only an aside, yet it expresses a central aspect of mankind’s perception of nature. Nature, also, possesses the two qualities of Queequeg’s tomahawk-pipe: violence and the peace of comfort.

Put simply, humanity cannot fully enjoy its peace because it cannot wholly escape its violence. This is enough to set us apart from nature and all animals. We can neither possess both at once, nor be quietly subject to either. Violence always fails to satisfy. Peace always fails to last. However, in nature we perceive both qualities existing in unison, as they do in Queequeg’s pipe, because no creatures, except for human beings, seem to complain. Instead, they roll steadily forward on the landscape, in silent wagons, while the fifth wheel—the human soul—loudly creaks.

First, connect this notion to the text. Notice Queequeg’s prowess in battle. As a skilled, victorious warrior, he represents the dominance that Captain Ahab covets. Queequeg’s tomahawk-pipe therefore parallels Ahab’s bold harpoon. Yet the pipe contains a comfort that the captain cannot muster. Captain Ahab is more than other men, he is “above the common,” yet in this way Queequeg surpasses him. (This offers another reason to interpret Queequeg’s character as wholly natural, not like a man.) He carries everywhere an impossible combination: his tomahawk-pipe. For him it holds no contradiction, but for Ahab it proves maddeningly paradoxical.

Second, in defense of my contention and to clarify its cause, a quick anecdote about a grasshopper:

            Years ago, I was driving on my way out of town when I noticed a small, green grasshopper perched on my windshield. As I drove onto a highway, I watched the intrepid insect, to see what the outcome would be. At 40 mph, it turned resolutely into the oncoming wind. At 55 mph, its antennae straightened over its back, in an attitude of utmost determination. At 70 mph, though it persevered for several seconds, it vanished from the windshield.

           

Consider: what became of the grasshopper next? Assuming it is not crushed against the pavement—insects are light and very resilient—is this grasshopper now forever destitute? Is it lost, as a human would be? Does it begin its Homeric voyage back to a backyard Ithaca? Does it long for home, the land of its birth? Or does it quietly hop away from the noise of the highway, seize calmly on a blade of grass, and sing for a mate with which to propagate its kind in this newfound verdure?

We can hardly imagine any outcome but the last. Only a man might be wretched, resisting his fate. The fifth wheel of his soul makes him disagreeable. But an animal survives, as it always has, being never at home (in the human sense) and so perfectly at home wherever it lands.  Therefore, we perceive nature as both innocent and independent—a lamb and a lion. Like Melville’s Queequeg; his peaceful warrior. But what causes this perception?  Nature has a wondrous ability to negate itself. It can be nothing and die silent. Nature greets us, the scientist and the backyard observer alike, with the outstretched hand of a species, and what is a species if not a collection of negated individuals? The human race alone turns dissatisfied from nature’s habitat, and nature cannot recognize Ahab’s willful independence.

So nature has everything we want, and yet offers us nothing. It provides everything for the body, and it kills the body, but the soul persists. The human being is body and soul. This prevents our calm subjection to violence and comfort together, for mankind is and ought to be eternal. Queequeg, therefore, is decidedly fictitious. He cannot be, but in fiction he reveals our being.

He tells us also of God: he imagines a Being able to manage both qualities, being subject to nothing and at home in perfect Individuality.

11 It's Not a Race

The whaling ship Pequod is described:

            “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, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.  Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.  Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.” [my emphasis.]

Melville’s appetite for cannibalism must be remarked.  The author establishes a clear relation between the whaling vessel and Queequeg, the cannibal.  Current appetites tend to read Queequeg’s character as the figurehead for the novel’s discussion of race, yet this interpretation makes nothing of the quote above (a ship, with more than a hundred sundry souls aboard, cannot be a race).  The thematic relationship fails.  Severance of this kind will kill a novel, like taking a fish from water.  A novel thrives, though at a depth, on the expectation of consistency.  If inconsistent, it is a poor novel; if great, it will be consistent.  Trust the relation, then seek to interpret: Queequeg and the Pequod are cannibals. 

Melville’s use of cannibal has little to do with race.  In Moby-Dick, race appears as flotsam on the sea—briefly noted by the pilot’s eye as he fixes on the greater wreck ahead.  The ship runs over race, in order that it might later take survivors from the sea.  Based on the correlation between Queequeg and the Pequod, I propose Melville’s use of cannibal refers to nature itself, and its wild conditions.

The ship clearly represents home—the universally common place each character inhabits.  And what else is home to the human race, if not nature?  Melville states his meaning precisely and avoids the inherent vagueness of the word: he will not write nature, he writes cannibal instead.  This not only names the place, but interprets it.  Nothing lives in nature but it devours natural things.  Death and growth overflow, but never in equal balance.  While nature preys upon itself, the human race watches, horrified.

Queequeg, however, seems immune to this horror.  He is a creature both in and of nature, wholly natural.  Cannibal himself, he knows nature’s life-and-death conditions.  He places himself willingly in nature’s teeth.  Ironically, his fearlessness makes him remarkable and thus grandly individual—a hero of the novel, thrice a savior.  Placed in contrast with Captain Ahab’s insistent solitariness, the term cannibal becomes a central consideration of the text as a whole.  Our hero is the man who can inhabit contentedly the cannibal Pequod.

But Melville’s human authorial intention exceeds the natural condition.  Three times, Queequeg saves drowning men: a stranger, a fellow harpooneer, and ultimately Ishmael.  Queequeg preserves life, and thus his humanity.  The human race, inhabiting this place, still wants to live.  So, to fathom cannibal nature raises the question, to what end does Queequeg preserve these lives?

Ishmael asserts his reason for going to sea: “I want to see the world.”  Being urged, therefore, to take a look, Ishmael comments:

            “Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean.  The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.”

Such a monotonous world forbids individuality.  It also overwhelms race.  Ishmael sees the world as “not much…nothing but water…”  All humanity ships under this condition.  The hero contents himself to live in the jaws of death, dedicated to preservation of life, yet all the while individually obsolete.  Is such contentedness possible outside of fiction?  Humanly possible, I mean.  Can Ishmael resign himself to not be Isaac?  Can a man resign himself?  Integral to Melville’s artistry, therefore, is the assurance of future sanctuary.  In its secret hold, Moby-Dick bears a discussion of faith upon the open ocean.  It seeks to navigate cannibal nature.

10 Ship Shape

Melville asserts the following concerning the ship Pequod:

            “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!  All noble things are touched with that.”

What does this mean?  Perhaps Melville’s style finds its source in the blustering, profound, unintelligible expressions of busy sailors driving truths into the sky and sea to hold it fast.  The above appears at the end of a paragraph; he does not defend his assertion.  Yet it floats.  We ought to read as though we are green hands on deck—I believe the word is lubber—observing the behavior of the more experienced, trusting their insight and waiting for their actions to be proved.  The remainder of the chapter proves the merit of Melville’s assertion.  (And may also save us from wrecking!)

What does Melville mean by noble?  What greatness arises from the placeless setting (“everlasting itch for things remote”) the early chapters so firmly establish?  Greatness requires a certain violence in a world of Ishmaels—remember this character’s Biblical appellation: “his hand will be against every man.”  Only by great strain can Ishmael become an Isaac for a time.  So Melville sets the stage for Captain Ahab.  He pilots the Pequod.  Between the man and the ship he commands, Melville unfurls the standard of human greatness.

We will soon (relatively speaking) follow the Pequod out to sea.  Melville spends only enough time on land to introduce Ishmael.  He then commits his book to the deep.  The novel is set in empty ocean—its pages are best bound in blue.  The ship, then, represents mankind’s habitation for the remainder of the story.  This is Melville’s junior metaphor, outstripped only by the Whale.  The ship symbolizes nation, city, house, and even body: all the homes of Man.  And it wanders, tossed by storms.

Melville describes Captain Ahab as follows:

            “…a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.”

Ahab is one in a nation’s census.  Melville locates his nobility in his brave independence.  His novel is American, after all.  The storm clouds of this human greatness breathe also an audacious honesty: far from the traditions of civilization, they read the savage-sweet book of Nature.  Being great means bearing no illusions of grandeur.  Being independent means sailing alone.  Human greatness, if truly great, must be solitary, reading in Nature the true name of man—Ishmael.  Yet Ahab will not be an Ishmael, but a “crowned king.”  Greatness lies in an independent will.

The chapter entitled “The Ship” conspicuously closes with an impression of its captain:

            “…what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him.”

Captain Ahab’s independence sets him far adrift.  On a ship he makes his home.  Full of pain, he fills his ship with melancholy, as all noble things must do.

9: Seafaring and Fair Seeing: Part III

One final observation solidifies Moby-Dick’s American citizenship: the character of savage Queequeg.  The word savage, perhaps, has lost its appeal.  But, for Melville, fashioning a hero for his wayfaring masterpiece necessitates its use.   Describing Queequeg’s native home, Melville quips, “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”  Queequeg is “placeless,” and therefore placed.  His savagery liberates him from misplaced pride, which Melville finds in the heart of all evil.  Melville’s highest good might be humility; his darkest sin blasphemy.  In the same way, American society finds its place in brave and honest humility.

In Chapter 10, Melville describes Queequeg’s appearance:

            “Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.  And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.  He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor… It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him... Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”

Washington and Queequeg epitomize the conceptual American citizen.  Washington refuses pomp and kingship from the start; he displays a “simple honest heart.”  He leads his fellows through desperate undertakings; he possesses a “spirit that would dare a thousand devils.”  His greatness roots not in title, birthplace, or blood, but in personal virtue.  His “lofty bearing”—coupled not with savage but with pagan, invoking the ancient virtues: Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence—his lofty bearing marks his independence: he owes nothing but to God.

Queequeg, like America, seems impossibly independent:

            “Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home… and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.”

With what apparent, astounding ease does this nation found itself even on the ocean-vastness of the American wilderness?  Its fashioning provides a singularly clear insight into human savagery and its desire for a final place.  Yet, as Melville has said already, “true places” do not appear on any map.  How, then, does this nation fashion itself?  By what virtue will the author recognize his hero?  That ship floats on honesty. 

Melville relates the following vision of the sea:

            “How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.”

Being displaced, only in honest humility can mankind locate any true “magnanimity”—and that only of the sea!  The sea permits no records of birth or knighthood.  Only from this honesty can Melville, a human creator, fashion his hero.

Read the remaining introductory chapters, until the introduction of the ship Melville will drive into sea.  The plain recognition of placelessness pervades.  No earthly foundation sustains, especially the deck of Ahab’s ship.  This novel defends its citizenship with a brave realization that no earthly place can be the place mankind requires.  Its astounding depiction of human pride begins in brave humility.

Yet how can such displacement be habitable?  Because its bedrock belief—that there exists a joy higher than the depth of our tragic humility—firmly asserts: not strength, but weakness; not heritage, but waywardness; not nobility, but savagery; defying false pride for true heroics, temporal in this place in the hope of Another’s deep eternity.  By this America can face the wilderness, fashioning civilized society from the knowledge of human vagrancy.  By this, too, Queequeg bravely faces the wild ocean, alone successful.