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.
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