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.
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