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.

8 The Thesis

In the unquiet chapel (see post 6: The Talking Dead), Melville again repeats his mantra: “What could be more full of meaning?”  He means the pulpit where the minister of the chapel stands, about to give his sermon:

            “Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”

Our voyage incomplete, Melville calls on the minister in "The Pulpit" and "The Sermon" to relate to us the novel's outline.  His message reaches a ship at sea.  Melville will spend the majority of his masterpiece articulating this placeless posture.  Melville embeds his answer to this predicament in the minister’s sermon.  The sermon rings from the vessel’s prow; it parts the dark water.  It forms the bedrock of his novel.

First, the minister embarks upon his sea-swell sermon with this quote:

            “’And God had prepared a great fish swallow up Jonah.’”

This requires little analysis.  Ahab’s doom, the Leviathan, with which suffering Job could not contend.  What could be more full of meaning?  Man is subject to the fish!

Second, the minister asserts:

            “And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”

In Moby-Dick, Melville will shape an ingenious representation of humankind, whose will resists the One Irresistible, whose angry tread would leave ocean tracks, whose tower’s view perceives the coming of its own destruction.  Ahab (that tower) conspicuously obeys himself.  Almost completely independent, he comes close perfect individuality, and his will would succeed but for the fish.  Thus, the difficulty of self-denial reveals itself in him.  His greatness attracts as it careens, while all others seem to flounder.  He endures all hardships to escape this hardest one.    

Third, Melville expresses Ahab’s singularity through the captain’s forward-facing gaze.  Ahab leans into the wind, hastening the whole ship forward towards “a voyage complete,” with Ahab at the prow.  Consider this posture and its likeness to the minister’s reading of Jonah:

            “Screwed at is axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.  […]  ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’”

The minister provides, perhaps, a meager interpretation of the Book of Jonah, yet he gives an overwhelming illustration of human rebellion—man’s wild siege against the willful sea.  Jonah flees God, committing his body to the dismal deep and his mind to close confinement.  In short, he makes an Ishmael of himself, a shiftless vagabond.  Melville most fervently applies his genius to this fugitive will.  He does so, often, with descriptions of its opposite, the sea: “But at that moment [Jonah] is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks.”  Man cannot make fast his shiftless will in this far shiftier element.  His independence must be false.

Finally, having considered all this, the minister at last comforts his audience:

            “But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.”

This final message will reappear, pages and pages hence.  It is Melville’s bold assertion in the face of his own dark, storm-torn creation.  Melville is the minister.  He reads mankind as the other reads Jonah.  Both are in earnest.  Melville, like the minister, intends “to preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood.”  For this reason, he creates Captain Ahab.