7 Seafaring and Fair Seeing: Part II

Concerning the significance of American Literature:  When Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick, this nation is but 75 years old—can we believe a nation might produce its “great classic” in just 75 years?  This indicates a deeper question:

Is America old enough to have classics at all?

Any American novel has not yet stood the test of time, considering the age-old literary legacy with which it means to converse.  As a student of American letters—a student by necessity, because I love this nation’s literature—I advocate a sterner test.  I do not mean to diminish time’s aptitude for sifting chaff (in many cases, I await it eagerly), I only wish to clarify a measurement by which the reader can rest assured that great new books will stand the test of time, time being allowed.  The test of time is but a secondary proof.

To argue this, I will consider Dante’s The Divine Comedy, a chief influence of Melville’s.  Dante’s introduction, via Virgil, to Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan in Canto Four of Inferno is widely known, and his admission as a sixth in that personified library inspires not a few knowing nods.  This authorial choice may well be a form of medieval marketing, yet in such a work, one cannot dismiss it as merely advantageous to the author.  In this scene, Dante signifies, quite consciously and unmistakably, what he intends his text to be: another Great Epic, in the model of the past.  And, time makes plain, it is just that!  So how, in 1308, can Dante know his epic poem will stand beside that of his ancient maestro-poet?  How, if not by some means other than the test of time?

One might reply, any madman can write “I am Homer” on a page, yet only one has stood the test.  Of the others who have done this, we will never know.

Another scene—one of my favorites—more deeply answers the matter.  Beatrice’s stern rebuke of Dante, at the close of Purgatorio, contains what I consider to be the greatest moral lesson in the poem.  Her admonishment reduces thus: love what lasts forever.  Consider her words:

            “…But by the bounteous gifts of divine grace—

                        whose rain descends from mists of such great height,

                        blest eyes themselves cannot approach that place—

            [Dante] was so disposed in his new life

                        that every natural habit, turned to good,

                        should have been put to wondrous proof in him,

            But when bad seed is sown in a rich field

                        or when earth full of vigor lies untilled,

                        the thornier and more harmful is its yield.

            For a time I sustained him with my sight:

                        showing to him my youthful eyes, I led him

                        and turned him with me toward the true and right.

            But once I stood upon the threshold of

                        my second age, exchanging life for life,

                        he took himself from me and gave his love

            To someone else.  From flesh to spirit I rose

                        and found less favor in his eyes, although

                        I’d grown more beautiful and virtuous.

            He turned his steps along a way not true,

                        pursuing the false images of good,

                        which promise all and never follow through.”

                                    (Trans. Anthony Esolen. The Modern Library Classics.)

This provides a final explanation of Dante’s beginning lost in a dark wood (see Melville’s Ishmael, blog post #4).  Beatrice’s reproach—love what lasts forever—requires Dante to have loved immediately her “youthful eyes” and to have maintained that love even after she has parted from the world.  Beatrice, throughout the text, signifies Beauty itself: the object of every poet.  She is Eurydice to his lyric Orpheus.  He must love her absent as well as present, and from the first.  By his first true love of Beauty, Dante can distinguish what is lasting from the “false images of good.”

Thus, Dante not only can perceive the lasting good, but he must—even in its youth.  Beauty requires it.  Greatness in a novel offers and requires the same.  Melville knows what he’s doing when he begins: “Call me Ishmael.”  A story so begun, in the hands of a master, cannot fail to stand the test of time.  I guarantee it.  This is the beauty of truth, that its goodness might be loved, even in its youth.

This blog intends to do so.  One more point remains to ground this novel firmly on this youthful nation, firmly rooted in the past’s great literature, and blooming with an equal greatness.  From then on, all is loving Beauty and a story’s power to convey.

6: Talking Dead

Chapter 7, “The Chapel,” contains the argument of Moby-Dick in its entirety.  Before continuing with Queequeg’s character, Melville draws our attention to a small New Bedford chapel.  Here he makes two observations that should remain in the reader’s mind for the rest of the story.  These comments frame the chapter with a profound insight into human existence.  “The Chapel” begins as Ishmael once more wraps his chilled form against inclement weather.  This recalls Ishmael’s sojourning status and the insufficiency of his covering:

            “…I fought my way against the stubborn storm.”

The earth is as unforgiving as the sea—the latter a figure of the deep reality of the former.  Melville places Ishmael against the storm as a metaphor of human will, and as a prescient introduction to Captain Ahab.  What’s more, the penultimate assertion of this milestone chapter reads:

            “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.”

How beautiful a line for a grim thought!  Death follows mankind’s bout with the storm.  So Moby-Dick is tragedy, but this is only the penultimate assertion, not the last word.

In the chapel, Ishmael observes several plaques adorning one wall, each memorializing a whaler lost at sea.  Ishmael’s perception penetrates deeply.  While the tragedy of death certainly pervades, the isolation of the scene strikes a graver chord:

            “A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.  Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.”

Ishmael feels strongly the inhumanity of the scene.  The lack of community (“incommunicable”), the lack of common ground (“insular”), both indicate a source of tragedy more unfathomable than death.  Ishmael’s outcast nature stirs in empathy.  Melville keeps one eye on this darker tomb throughout his novel.

Queequeg cannot fathom this blackness (or is it blankness?), but for a different reason:

            “Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.  This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.”

Far from scorning this savage, Ishmael admires his curiosity, his wonder, but most of all his unaffected calm.  Queequeg does not hear these mortal murmurs.  Ishmael must hear them and, momentarily, he quails.  The source of his sorrow, and that of the other mourners, lies in the absence of a corporal memorial: they have “placelessly perished” in the sea, leaving nothing landed but the vacant words of these plaques.  Nothing remains for the wounded heart to grieve, to mark and remember.  Their grief becomes intangible, insular.  And following this explanation, Melville repeats his central premise: “All these things are not without their meanings.”  That is, the dead do speak.  They assert the monumental importance of the body to the living man.

I said that this speech was only the penultimate.  Melville closes the chapter with a winner-take-all turn:

            “But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope… In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”    

Melville will spend the remainder of the novel effecting the transition.  Notice Ishmael’s quickness to adopt the notion.  What has Ishmael to hold?  What does he call his own?  Where can he bury it?  Because he is Ishmael—out of the inevitability of the grave, from that deepest sea—he draws out hope with a fish hook.  The frailty of the body indicates, to him, the truer substance of the soul.  Thus Melville records the happy cadence of the dead.

5: Seafaring and Fair Seeing: Part I

In Chapters 4 through 6, Melville establishes his setting—no small feat in a seafaring novel.  Having set out to identify the character of humanity, he finds no better metaphor for that character’s place than the sea.  Enter the vagrant Ishmael with his thirst for open water.  But Melville does not set his drifter adrift until he has established a foundation for this slippery metaphor.  These are the New Bedford/Nantucket chapters.  Ishmael only sets sail to express the nature of his terrestrial existence.  Thus, Melville’s conflation of town and tide establishes his vision of the American nation and sets his novel afloat in the slow stream of canonical literature.

The vagrant is an ancient character.  He is not, however, Ulysses.  True, Ulysses fares on the sea, yet with one fundamental distinction (the most fundamental): he leaves from foreign shores heading home.  Ishmael does the opposite.  While both characters sail by the same breeze of desire, Ishmael goes forth with a decidedly Christian interpretation of the world: namely, that every earthly place corrupts, falls short, and fades away.  All land erodes.  He therefore never sails for, only from.  This wild idea, though at first only terrifying, illuminates much.  It assumes that we ought to be somewhere, that what we are is not what we ought to be.  This begins to define the human being.  We cannot help but identify with Ishmael.

America was founded—it is no small feat—on this Christian understanding, yet without abandoning the previous literary vision: Ulysses.  The human being is an Ishmael who ought to be Ulysses.  This is the only true literary foundation.  It is a watery one, yet decidedly earthly.  It keeps us writing.  By this, American literature brings to bear all that has been said before upon the liquid darkness of the wild.  I do not argue that it necessarily says more, only that it certainly cannot say less.

Were Ishmael not knowledgeable of this, he would not be American.  It is Ishmael’s perceptiveness that makes him most appealing (his good humor follows closely).  Ishmael is the literate, writing, and observant man set to wander in the wild.  His has an eye for meaning and misses nothing—the mark of one well read. 

Speaking of which, I have said very little about Melville’s text.  Queequeg appears in Chapter 4.  One must be cautious of misinterpreting him—he stands for much more than a bout with racism.  Ishmael sees him so:

            “It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.”       

I will say more about Queequeg later.  For now, understand him simply as the embodiment of the wild idea contained in Ishmael’s sentiment—an American idea, though markedly Shakespearean.  Queequeg is an individual, measured only by the merit of his heart, divorced of outward deception and flattery, existing only when man faces the savage truth of his placeless habits.  Queequeg illuminates the following reality concerning nations:

“Whence came they?  […]  Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered.  Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.  One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

Establishing a new nation on this continent requires the same.  Establishing a place on this sifting globe requires the same.  Establishing personal independence in the wilderness requires the same…or does it?  Queequeg is a complex character, but most of all he serves as a foil to Ahab.  This will come.  Queequeg’s wild nature reflects an American wilderness, not of deep forests and rolling prairies, not of scudding mountain snows, but of the honest human heart.  American authors foray into this wilderness, equipped with the full benefit of Western understanding, stripped fully of the hindrance of European accommodations.

So we must know Queequeg better.  Melville’s complex introduction moves much like a ship: its confounding rigging spans to catch a plain and forthright wind.