I’ve always regretted not having an
opportunity to teach Moby Dick; or, The
Whale (1851), a book that I reread every few years. Here are some of my
impressions about this book and about two others of Melville, during the summer
when he turns two hundred.
Moby
Dick’s narrator—let’s call him Ishmael--goes to sea whenever he gets the
“Hypos” and it’s “a damp, drizzly November” in his soul. Up to now it’s been
the Merchant Marine, but now he wants to try a whaling voyage. Everyone, he
argues, has “ocean reveries” about going to sea. He won’t be a passenger, even
though he has to take orders; everyone has to take orders, “and so the
universal thump is passed round.” He confesses that “the overwhelming idea of
the great whale himself” was the chief motive, and he imagines “one grand
hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”
New Bedford’s whaling chapel and its
pulpit ready us for Melville’s great metaphor in reverse: is a ship like life?
Well, this chapel is like a ship, with a pulpit like the foretop or the bows
and beak; also the inscriptions around the chapel remind us of the chances of
getting out of this whaling voyage alive. The point of the Jonah sermon, which
Father Mapple takes so personally, isn’t clear to me—that is, its application
to the book as a whole. Somewhere Melville says “This whole book is but a
draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.”
In New Bedford he has to share a bed
at the Spouter Inn with Queequeg the harpooner, a South Pacific islander (“a
native of Kokovoko…..It is not down in any map; true places never are” says the
narrator, a view about truth and art that sounds like he’s looked hard at Don Quixote). Queequeg is tattooed all
over, but is well-mannered and brave, as he proves when the Nantucket’s boat’s
boom gets away and a man is swept overboard—he deals with both problems.
Co-owners Captains Bildad and Peleg
hire Ishmael and Queequeg and after getting a sort of warning from an old
sailor named Elijah (lots of Old Testament characters referred to in the
opening chapters) they go on board the Pequod,
which sets sail and “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.” Captain
Ahab is not seen for several days, but then he shows up on the quarter-deck,
where he plants his peg leg in a hole in the deck and grasps a shroud. The
weather improves as they run down the latitudes, and after a while Ahab musters
everyone aft, nails a sixteen-dollar gold piece to the mizzen mast, and tells
everyone it will go to the person who sights the white whale, Moby Dick, who
took Ahab’s leg off and whom Ahab has sworn to pursue—that being the purpose of
this voyage. He pours grog into the cup at the base of the harpoons, and the
heads of the three whaleboat crews all drink from them: Starbuck the first
officer and his harpooner Queequeg, the second mate Stubb and his harpooner
Tashtego, a Gay Head (Wampanoag) Indian, and Flask, the third mate and his
harpooner Daggoo, a black African. Melville handles some of these scenes as if
they were plays, with speech headings and stage directions.
In his first chapter on cetology,
the author parts with Linnæus:
despite lungs, warm blood, and milk-fed young, whales are fish, he says, and he
divides them into the big ones (Folios) such as Sperm Whales and Right Whales,
medium sized ones (octavos) and little ones (duodecimos). And in “The Whiteness
of the Whale” Melville handles this as he does other topics as an essayist
would, with a historical survey, allusions to biblical and literary
manifestations of the topic—in general, the exhaustive approach. When we get
the Town-Ho’s story, it’s like a
Cervantean interpolated narrative, though it directly concerns our whale, and
is told in “the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle
of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick gilt-tiled
piazza of the Golden Inn.”
At the first lowering after a
sighted whale, Queequeg misses his mark, and a squall hits the boats and ship
as night comes on. Ishmael’s boat (he is in Starbuck’s and Queequeg’s) is run
over by the ship but all get aboard. Before the lowering, Ahab‘s own harpooner,
Fedallah, and his own crew suddenly show up, having been concealed below. The Pequod encounters meadows of brill and a
giant squid. A notable chapter in which the narrator describes the whale line
and then philosophizes on it is at almost the center of the book; the
philosopher sitting in his study realizes he is in no securer position, given
the vagaries of fate, than the men rowing the whaleboat with the line whizzing
past them inches away as the whale runs it out. Ships are like life, whales
come in different sizes like books, and the universal thump goes round.
The
ship rounds the Cape of Good Hope and heads into the Indian Ocean. Stubb kills
a whale and we watch the process of cutting-in, or peeling a strip of blubber
as the whale turns on its moored head and tail, until the whole hide is taken
off and lowered into the blubber-room, as the carcass, except for the head, is
cut loose for the sharks. A Right Whale is later killed and its head fastened
on the other side of the ship so that the narrator can compare them. While the
spermaceti is being ladled out of the Sperm Whale’s head in buckets, Tashtego
falls into the nearly empty case just as the head breaks loose from its tackles
and sinks into the sea. But “my brave Queequeg”—an apostrophe that reminded me
of Homer’s “O my swineherd” in the Odyssey—jumps
over with a boarding-sword and frees Tashtego.
In the Straits of Sunda the Pequod is pursued by Malay pirates but
outruns them. A pod of whales is pursued as it runs purposefully away, but then
it becomes “gallied”—confused and frightened—and the boats are able to overtake
it, killing some and marking the carcasses with a “waif” or pole with a
pennant, wounding others and attaching thick squares of wood called druggs to
the harpoon line while other whales are pursued. Within the pod they find a
newborn calf still trailing its umbilical cord and young whales mating.
The narrator describes the
Try-Works, used to render the blubber strips into oil. After the first, wood
fire, the try-works is fed with the leavings of the strips, called fritters.
“The whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body,” writes the
narrator, who finds a moral or a metaphor in everything he sees, everything
that happens to him, at the same time as he cautions us against interpreting
anything as allegory. The point seems to be that the world we know, rightly
observed, is as odd and meaningful as we could imagine any constructed
narrative, as here “the rushing Pequod,
freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging
into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her
monomaniac commander’s soul.”
Ahab, eager to get to the cruising
ground in the pacific, at first refuses to haul up the leaking oil casks, but
then acquiesces. Meanwhile Queequeg sickens and has the carpenter build him a
coffin, but after trying it out, he decides to live, and the coffin is caulked
and used for a life-buoy at the taffrail—the old one sank when one of the men
fell from the rigging into the sea—the first death on the Pequod’s current voyage. The ship moves into the Pacific. Ahab has
a harpoon made of nail stubs from old racing horses’ shoes with a barb made of
his razors, and tempers it in the “heathen blood” of Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo.
Then it gets an additional tempering, during a typhoon, from the corpusant, or
St. Elmo’s Fire, which also reverses the compass polarity, but Ahab magnetizes
a new needle. The Pequod bespeaks a
boat, the Rachel, whose Captain
Gardner has lost a whale boat with his own son on board. Ahab refuses to join
him in the search.
As the book nears its conclusion,
the passages of description get even more portentous and alliterative. The day
before Moby Dick is sighted for the first time, a beautiful mild day, Ahab is
on the deck, Starbuck moves close to him, and they have a conversation in which
Ahab confesses to misgivings about a life spent so much at sea that he hasn’t
spent three years ashore out of the last forty, essentially widowing his younger
wife, and now crippled and consumed by a demonic chase. Starbuck begs him to
give it up, but the old man (he’s really only fifty-eight, as he says here)
talks about fate, and Starbuck walks away in despair.
Ahab himself sights the white whale
the next day, and all boats except Starbuck’s (Ahab has exempted him pointedly)
lower away and chase. Moby Dick takes Ahab’s boat in his mouth and bites it in
two. The second day Moby Dick destroys all the boats, and Fedallah is entangled
in the lines and dragged down when the whale sounds. They rig spare boats for
the third day, when they again sight the whale and also see the dead Fedallah
attached to him. The narrator is in Ahab’s boat as it is again damaged by the
whale; he is thrown out. Then the whale attacks the Pequod and sinks it. Ahab throws a last harpoon and in trying to
free the line, gets it wrapped around his neck and is pulled down by the
sounding whale. The last whale boat sinks, and Queequeg’s coffin rises to the
surface, providing a life buoy for the narrator, the only one left alive, until
he is picked up by the Rachel, still
searching for the Captain’s son.
We can’t help but wonder if Ishmael
isn’t put off his habit of going to sea whenever he gets the “Hypos” after his
time with Captain Ahab. But he and the reader have learned a good deal about
obsession, about life in the whale fishery, and they’ve also had a good deal of
adventure in the process.
Melville’s
ninth and last novel, The Confidence-Man:
His Masquerade (1857), happened to be published on April 1st,
the day on which the book’s story takes place. Melville underlines his Ship of
Fools situation on a riverboat, the Fidèle,
bound downstream from St. Louis to New Orleans. The narrator introduces a
succession of men who separate other passengers from their money and whose
theme is confidence, which expands
from the idea of simple trust to include charity, fellow-feeling, optimism, and
generally what keeps society going. A seemingly crippled black man who calls
himself Guineau, a man wearing mourning in his hat, a man in a grey coat, and a
florid man carrying a book are the first apparent manifestations of the
confidence-man. The book has a kaleidoscopic quality—or perhaps a hall of
mirrors would be a better metaphor, as one confidence man morphs into another
or one succeeds another throughout the book, sometimes sitting down two or
three at time and practicing on each
other.
A snake-oil salesman—actually he
sells the Samaritan Pain Dissuader and Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator—is there for
a few chapters, suddenly departing the salon and then returning to give half
his earnings to charity in the form of a man with a bandaged face. The salesman
turns into the Natural Bone-setter when interviewing a crippled man on deck who
tells him one story of his crippling, hobbles away to beg with another story,
and comes back. The herb-seller gives him several boxes of his ointment, but
the cripple insists on paying. Next the salesman sells a box of his herbs for
two dollars—instead of the 50 cents he’s been charging—to an old coughing miser
who invested his money with the florid man with the book.
A Missouri frontiersman shows up.
“Because a thing is nat’ral, as you call it, you think it must be good. But who
gave you that cough? Was it, or was it not, nature?” he says to the old man. He
expresses the cynical view about confidence. Knaves and fools are like horses
and oats—there are more of the latter, and they get eaten by the former. “You
are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man,” he says
to the herb-doctor when the latter will not commit to being an outright
abolitionist.
The herb-doctor leaves at Cape
Girardeau and is replaced by a “round-backed, baker-kneed man” with a brass
plate around his neck engraved PIO, for, he says, Philosophical Intelligence
Office. He talks the frontiersman, after “Tusculan Disputations,” into giving
him three dollars plus passage money to send him a boy in two weeks (the
frontiersman has admitted he keeps trying boy after boy, to the tune of thirty),
and then the PIO man goes ashore at Cairo. “Confidence is the indispensable
basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce…would, like a
watch, run down and stop” he says as he is going. Such talk about the necessity
of confidence is the constant tune of the confidence-men in this book, and it
is, any reasonable person must admit, true.
A sort of parti-colored Harlequin
figure that the narrator sometimes calls the Cosmopolitan, sometimes the
Philanthropist, who is soon identified as Frank Goodman, engages with the
frontiersman next, and we suspect him for a fraud when he says he never could
abide irony. No one inhabiting a Melville book can be quite legitimate when he
is averse to irony. When the frontiersman leaves, a young man in a purple vest,
later identified as Charles Arnold Noble, proceeds to compare the frontiersman
with an Indian-hater named Colonel Moredock, for several chapters. Charles
invites Frank to a glass of wine, and drinks very little himself. When Frank
asks Charlie for a loan of fifty dollars, Charlie acts as if he’s been bitten
by a snake.
A chapter intervenes in which the
narrator intrudes to defend the verisimilitude of his characters. Then Frank
tells the story of Charlemont, who at 29 suddenly turned from affable to
morose. Charlie leaves, and a cold stranger warns Frank against him. A “crazy
beggar” interrupts them and gets a shilling from Frank, nothing from the cold
one, who says Charles is “a Mississippi operator”—that is, a confidence-man.
The cold one, whose name is Mark Winsome (he refers to himself in the 3rd
person), has disciples, and introduces one of them, Egbert, to Frank and then
leaves. Frank asks Egbert to play his old friend Charlie in a dialogue, then
asks him for a loan. Egbert/Charlie refuses with many specious excuses, some
connected with the “philosophy” of Mark Winsome. Then he says the experience of
China Aster would dissuade him from the loan. We have to have the story of
China Aster then, and the movement of the book sometimes resembles that of the Thousand Nights and a Night in this
respect of succeeding characters and stories that must be immediately told.
China Aster was a candle-maker destroyed by accepting “a friendly loan.” The
cosmopolitan rejects the cold philosophy of Mark Winsome and his disciple. Then
he proceeds to cheat the barber out of a shave by getting him to take his “no
trust” sign down.
In the last chapter, the
cosmopolitan, disturbed at finding the quotations casting doubt on his optimism
and trust (quoted to him by the Mark Winsome disciple) in the bible, has an old
man point out to him that they are in the Apocrypha. The cosmopolitan brings up
the verse in Proverbs, “For the Lord shall be thy confidence.” As the lamp
light wanes he leads the old man to his berth, with the suggestion that
“Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”
There really is nothing hypocritical
about the cosmopolitan’s optimism about trust and confidence as a feature of
human beings—or such an attitude as expressed by any of the earlier
manifestations of the confidence-man on the Fidèle.
Such confidence is the necessary condition for their plying their livelihood.
And there seems to be the suggestion that the person who is never fooled by the
con man is lacking something human. Trust is the necessary condition of
business, as the PIO man points out. It may also be a necessary condition for
most human interaction. The quality that
enables us to connect with each other is also the one that enables some of us
to prey on the others. These are the sorts of ironies that made Melville’s
creative impulses work.
Though
The Confidence Man was the last novel
he published, Billy Budd, Sailor can
be called his last work, not published until thirty years after his death. Its
story is straightforward enough, even though, as Melville makes clear at the
end, Billy Budd’s story inspired quite different reactions.
When Billy Budd is impressed into a
British navy ship (shortly after the navy has suffered two mutinies), he shouts
to his former ship, “Goodbye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.” The handsome sailor arouses the hate of Claggart,
the master-at-arms, just because of his innocence and beauty. When Claggart
falsely claims Budd was inciting a mutiny, Captain “Starry” Vere summons the
two of them to his cabin, where Billy the stutterer is unable to answer
Claggart’s lies and strikes him, killing him instantly.
The drumhead court-martial affords
no opportunity for its members to argue Claggart’s evil calumny (which neither
they nor Vere believe) or Budd’s guiltlessness of anything except the
frustration of being unable to reply to Claggart’s lies. Vere forces the issue,
reminding them that the blow itself is a capital crime, and that failing to
enforce discipline might encourage mutiny. As Billy Budd is about to be hanged,
he cries “God bless Captain Vere!” and the crew echo his words.
Melville’s narrator tells us Billy
Budd’s name was Vere’s last word when he was killed in action. A supposed
extract from a naval gazette describes Budd as a likely foreigner and a
mutineer who stabbed the loyal Claggart. And finally, a ballad about Budd by a
fellow sailor ignores the issue of guilt or innocence.
One of my theories about this tale
is that it is twice as long as Melville intended it to be when finished. I
believe his method, at least in his late writing, was to put down alternate
descriptions and comment: Melville, I am convinced, would, had he finished the
story, have struck out the equivalent of every other sentence. The result would
have been a story half as long and even more striking than what we have, a tale
that already has the stunning force of Billy Budd’s fist.
Happy Birthday, Herman.
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