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.