novel of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Thomas L, Dumm

Who Is Ishmael?

IT IS A MOUNTAINOUS BOOK about the sea, an American bookof revelation.' It represents a world, or worlds, that may be interpreted to infinite degrees, and have been. Since its rehabili- tation by F.O. Matthiesson in the first part of the twentieth cen- tury, a hterary industry has grown to explore its fathomless depths. Journals devoted to MelviUe seem as much devoted to this one book itself as to all of the rest of his amazing oeuvre. Hershel Parker hinges his massive Ufe of Melville around the gestation and pubhcation of it. Charles Olson assumes that the study of it is the most meaningful study of Melville (a man who, he claims, and I must agree, is later ruined by his re-conversion to Christianity), and it is also Olson who provides the poetry to render aU future studies of it weak in comparison. C.L.R. James has made it the quintessential artistic representation of the impossible pohtics of American raciahsm. It has been made into film, into opera, and into a major Laurie Anderson performance piece. It has been borrowed by aU forms of popular culture so ubiquitously that its characters are a shorthand for specific forms of madness, a fit echoing of Melville's own use of master Shakespeare's characters. The conflation of Melville the author with the narrator of the story—caU him Ishmael (for now)— inevitably has encouraged psychoanalytic studies, perhaps most prominently Michael Rogin's densely layered argument con- cerning the family fortune of the Melville clan and the political economy of a country on the brink and in the aftermath of civil war. The influence of the book on one of Melville's own descen- dents has been so pronounced that he has named himself Moby, and has created ambient music reminiscent of the ocean. It is, in other words, a great temptation, a book to be reckoned with by anyone who wants to think about American experience.

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I have my own temptations when it comes to Moby-Dick. I am interested in loneHness, and among its many themes Moby-Dick is a book about loneliness—the loneHness of Ahab, but for me, above all, the loneliness of the person, whoever he is, w^ho says, "Call me Ishmael." Who is Ishmael? For me, this is the most important question to ask if we are to think about the lonely self, this strange self that is beyond itself. The "who" of this question centers our thinking about the ends of loneHness—^is there a "who" to whom v̂ ê may repair, an identity that is able to settle us, a place for our placelessness, a home in the world for the lonely? In the end such a question is unavoidably a metaphysical one, but the sub-sub of the Sub-Sub, the pale consumptive usher of MelviUe's grammar school, inherits these questions, if not the earth, if not the sea. A part of that inheritance is the figure who shadows Ishmael, another member of Ahab's crew, Pip, the cook's assistant, privy to the secret knowledge of the deepest thought- diver whose own secrets are hopelessly entangled with this ques- tion, and whose claims on an answer to the question may lead us to a new way to understand the lonely self in America.

In one of the most recent studies of Moby-Dick, Eyal Peretz also asks "Who is Ishmael?" and presents his own, startHngly original answers.

Moby-Dick is the narrative of Ishmael, the single survivor and sole witness to a horrendous disaster at sea in which all his friends were killed and brought to an early, stoneless and unmarked grave. As if wanting to share his friends' destiny, he has left his given name at sea and has adopted the Bibhcal name Ishmael, thus indicating his abandonment and loss. From now on he wishes to be called Ishmael and not by his given name, which remains forever unknown. The story we are about to hear is his testimony, and it is the testimony of a survivor.

Yet this is not au. Peretz notes that Ishmael is a school teacher, a depressed person, and that he is drawn to sea by a strange attraction to the whale itself, this time choosing a whaler as his boat. Moreover, he is anonymous for reasons that touch deeply on the tale that MelviHe is trying to tell.

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"CaH me Ishmael." So he addresses the reader. And then he teHs a tale. But, Peretz asks us, his readers, what is the tale Ishmael is seeking to teH? Here things begin to get compHcated, for the tale is told by someone who is employing a kind of "spHtting" address, a narrative where the seaman's yarn is joined to testi- mony concerning a disaster, where fable is joined to witnessing. We readers are enjoined to beheve this story, to accept its reaHty while knowing of its fabulous character. Monstrous fable is joined to what Ishmael insists is independent testimony in order to estabhsh the great truth of the story.̂ This ambiguous struc- ture of address, Peretz teHs us, ought to force us to reconsider the meaning of those opening words. "The opening thus says: either my name is Ishmael and you should caH me by my name; or this is not my given name, but one called for by the conven- tions of fiction; or it is my name, carefuHy chosen, and in order to explain why I chose it I have to teH you my hfe's story; or, since I am an abandoned human, and feel hke a disowned son, I caH upon you, the readers, to adopt me and caH me by this name so that I won't be alone any more.""* (This last suggestion would also imply that we readers form a lost tribe, that we are disowned and abandoned, and that we are seeking some form of redemption by hstening to the narrator of this book.)^

Peretz moves on to consider how this complex form of address precludes the Hkehhood of final meanings, and hence to consider how this novel leads readers from questions of meaning to questions concerning the relationship of power to authority. What is launched with Ishmael's desire to go to sea is a series of crises of authority in which the story of the whale as "the white event" overwhelms and interrupts any attempt to reassemble prior meanings. The w ĥale enables revolutions, the sort of trans- formations where nothing wiH remain the same, but at a cost that wiH be experienced by the survivor of the encounter with the whale as a shattering of his identity. So we may call him Ishmael, but that begs the question of w ĥo he is and who he has been. Thus Ishmael's injunction to caH him by that name may itself be understood as a demand or plea that we help him evade the ghost of his former self.

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The possibilities outlined by Peretz advance our understand- ing o( Moby-Dick substantially. But there is a significant path left partly unexplored by him—how could there not be? The novel, is, after all, infinitely large—a path that opens a différent but connected perspective on the fact of shattered identity and its role in the unfolding of a sense of self, a perspective intimately connected to the terrific loneliness of the protagonist of the novel. Where to begin? We may note that Ishmael's occupation of schoolteacher gives him special powers to impart lessons of the sea, both factual and moral, to those who choose to listen to him. (Peretz, much later in his analysis, discusses at length Ishmael's attempts to provide pedagogic authority for the tale he witnesses.) In this sense Ishmael could also be imagined as the "metaphysical professor" who accompanies in thought all those w ĥo gaze out to sea.̂ (Cl) If it is to be Ishmael's Hfe story that he tells, though, it is strangely abridged, for we know very little of him when we are introduced to him, and nothing of his past experience other than as a country schoolmaster w ĥo has had a rough transition to becoming a sea-man.

However, while we learn httle of his past experience, in the same passage we learn something of his genealogy. Ishmael ges- tures toward a distinguished family tree, commenting on how hard it is for some to adjust to the lowly status of sea-man. "It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes."^ (Cl) While the Van Rensselaers were a dis- tinguished family, and Hardicanute a Swedish king, of particular interest is the reference to the Randolphs, w ĥo are one of the oldest and most distinguished Virginia names, the family of Thomas Jefferson. It huilt its fortune from the labor of slaves. To imagine oneself a Randoph suggests that one is a slaveholder. So Ishmael comes from a distinguished family. But the slippery lan- guage suggests that he may not. Moreover, in the very next paragraph he also asks "Who ain't a slave?"

Another clue. Peretz mentions the fact of Ishmael's name. In the Bihle Ishmael was the first-born son of Abraham, not con- ceived with Sarah, his w îfe, hut with Hagar, his slave. When in

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her barren years Sarah conceived Isaac, Ishmael and Hagar were sent into exile. For Peretz, the connotations of banishment and abandonment loom large in this name. Moreover, etymologically Ishmael means "God will hear."^ In this sense, the word incor- porates the notion of call or address. Peretz emphasizes the excess of meaning to be found in any call, that is to say, how any call overrides its meaning by virtue of its very form. He writes, "It is as if language is first of all an address and only secondarily a state- ment of meaning...."' It is as if, as Giambattista Vico insisted in his New Science, all language is first sung, and and only later spo- ken. "CaU me Ishmael" thus could be read as: "CaU me a caU," and as an imperative, "CaU this call,""Sing me my song," or "You must sing this song with me." In these words Ishmael anticipates the song of Whitman, but the song is to be a writing of the dis- aster, sung by the entire crew.

The call is also a calling, the desire for a vocation: Ishmael goes to sea in a direct attempt to shake off one self and to assume another through the vocational acceptance ofa caUing.The story that is his to tell is the story of his acceptance of the vocation of sea-man, of sojourner to the sea. But while he will tell us this tale, it is not one of redemption, even as it assumes the form of a conversion from one life to another. The conversion itself is to assume the most complicated and devihsh form, for what is to be born again is not a soul redeemed, nor, despite the inner turn it takes, a self-reHant self. Another way of putting the matter is to ask the question: Ishmael becomes a sea-man, but what was he before? And yet another question: when did he become a sea-man? When is Ishmael's moment of conversion?

God w ü̂l hear. What will he hear? It is a peculiarity of the novel that upon the departure of the Pequod to sea Ishmael seems to disappear, or at least gradually fade, into the role of narrator. Sometimes the events to which he is supposedly witness seem impossible for him to have observed. Occasionally he is an actor in the tale that he narrates. This too is a clue. Among the curiosi- ties of this book, the place of Ishmael as a witnessing narrator is especially curious. First, there is the question of Melville's autho- rial Hcense—he seems to place Ishmael as a witness to crucial

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scenes throughout the novel, allows him to hear the spoken thoughts of other characters, and makes him a seemingly constant presence at the key turns of plot and conversation. Of course, how else is one to teU the tale? We may imagine that wáthin the confines of such a Patagonian crew there is an infinite number of stories to be told, and we may even imagine that that Ishmael has only witnessed one iteration of the story. But what happens if we were to press the point, namely that this person we are to call Ishmael is, as Peretz reminds us, witnessing events, providing testimony? In that case the omnipresent narrator is not a possi- bility. So we must ask, how is it that Ishmael is present at certain scenes that only a witness could describe?

This question concerning the staging of the drama o{ Moby- Dick turns out to be crucially important. When we reflect on the confined geography of the Pequod, it is clear that for certain of the scenes Ishmael records he would in fact need to be present in or near the captain's quarters or the quarterdeck. For instance, while it would be easy enough to reconstruct the hierarchy of the cabin table without being present, the specific details of the presenta- tion of food and the conversation of the mates and harpooners, as well as the details concerning Dough-Boy, the steward, would need to be provided by an eyewitness. (C34) (To suggest that Ishmael might have asked some of the diners what they did at dinner table is not credible. He is, after aU, a witness, not a journalist.)

As another instance of Ishmael's mysterious witnessing, we may ask who is present during the conversation between Ahab and Stubb. (C29) This is the moment when Ahab is restlessly walking the deck in the middle of the night. Stubb "came up firom below" to request that Ahab muflle the noise of his peg-leg wdth some wadding. The famous confirontation—Ahab calls Stubb a dog ("Down dog, and kennel!")—is told firom the per- spective of a third party. Who is this v^atness? In yet another instance, the crucial confrontation between Starbuck and Ahab occurs in the cabin, also needing a witness. (C109) And finally, we have the moving and startling conversation between Ahab and Pip in the confines of the cabin as well. Who could possibly be witnessing this conversation? (C129)

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All these crucial conversations occur either in the captain's cabin, in the main cabin, or on the quarter deck immediately above those cabins and the mates' quarters. These quarters are in the stern of the ship, which also contains the captain's hold, whence emerged Ahab's secret team on the day of the first low- ering. (C48) Moreover, the aft compartment is where the har- pooners, as opposed to the men at sea, are lodged. (C33) The aft portion of the ship is also the location of the ship's galley, the place where could be found Pippin, or Pip, the person whom Ishmael describes as the most insignificant member of the crew, but the one to whom something most significant happens. (C93)

Consider Pip. Pip is in fact depicted as the least of all the sailors aboard the Pequod, the most isolated of that crew of isolatoes, tragically gone mad after he floats for too many hours upon an open sea wdth no hope of rescue. Ishmael teUs us that prior to his abandonment Pip was bright and tenderhearted and young, that he hailed fi-om Connecticut, a tambourine player and a fi-ee man. On the Pequod he is a ship-keeper, that is, one who is not assigned to work the boats, but to assist the cook and perform other menial chores. But he is assigned as a temporary replace- ment rower on second mate Stubb's whale boat, a position he takes with great reluctance, as he fears whales. On his second trip out he entangles himself in the Hne, causing it to be cut and hence for Stubb to lose a whale. After that first mishap Stubb tells Pip, "Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I wont pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by the Hkes of you; a whale would seU for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama." This threat to Pip's freedom, while satirical on Stubb's part, is truly frightening to Pip, since he appreciates what Stubb does not—that any black man is compelled to think this thought as part of his everyday experience in anticipation of Congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Ishmael describes Pip's first fate, his descent into madness after falHng out of Stubb's boat, as a consequence of his beHef that he has been truly and totally abandoned, just as Stubb had warned that he would be.

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By the merest chance the ship had at last rescued him; but from that hour the negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was.The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather, car- ried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman. Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip sâ v the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the fir- mament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wondering from all mortal reason; man comes at last to that celestial thought, which to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. (C93)

So when Pip falls firom the boat a second time he knows himself to be truly lost (even though it turns out that his abandonment is not a dehberate act by Stubb, but a tragic oversight). And so, it seems, his descent into madness. But Pip's self-knowledge and self-loss, we may come to learn, are both a part of a compHcated mystery.

Ishmael's portrait of Pip emphasizes, prior to his abandon- ment, his pleasant, genial, joHy brightness.Yet Ishmael also insists on Pip's brilHance, his exemplary character, his depth as a human being. In predicting Pip's second and final fate, Ishmael suggests that "w^hat was temporarily subdued in him, in the end ŵ as des- tined to be luridly iHumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural luster with w^hich in his native TuHand County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's froHc in the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star- beHed tambourine."

What is Pip's second fate? "I look; you look; he looks; we look; ye look; they look," he says in "The Doubloon." (C99) This recitation of the conjugation of the verb "to look" presents a strong contrast to the idea of seeing—we look, we do not neces- sarüy see. Pip looks at the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast and sees with his intensified sight that it is "the navel" of the ship. He notes that once nailed to the mast, the doubloon cannot be

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unscrewed without the ship itself falling apart. So it must stay, eventually to go to the hottom of that ocean where, Ishmael has reported, Pip in his own descent has heen granted a wisdom of madness. (The douhloon itself will not he recovered until the day of resurrection.) Pip's madness, in his descent, takes the form of a concentrated focus so intense as to result in his losing a sense of himself, a sort of ecstasy. The intense concentration of Pip's madness has everything to do with his repetition of the conju- gation of the verh "to look." This repetition of the verh with its latent imperative form— l̂ook, look!—implicitly urges us to think how we may use words to declare our knowledge of the world while also showing the hopelessness of all our attempts, spoken from a place of madness that Ishmael and Ahab hoth recognize to contain a reality larger than what we are prepared to accept if we are to remain sane. (The possihility of healing that is suggested in the dialogue of Pip and Ahab, in which their pairing may serve to repair hoth, the hope that each could be re-membered hy each other, must he refused hy Ahah in the name of his obsession with the white whale, his lost hmb, his lost member- ship in the world of men. Ahah's narrow vision propels him to his tragic fate, whereas Pip's will send him elsewhere.)

Pip's name itself bears yet another clue. His name, as Ishmael notes, is the nickname of Pippen, and one meaning of the word pip is seed, so Pip may he thought of as heing the seed of an apple, the heart ofthat which is the original temptation, and the original sin, the knowledge that will drive humanity out of par- adise. The OED is instructive on another point as weU—Pip is also a shortened version of "peep," a word which has among its meanings "to look." Pip also means the hlack mark that appears on playing cards and dice, giving the name an element of chance. Pip's mad looking encompasses those on hoard the Pequod. He may he thought of as the looker, the peeper, the secret witness to aU events, deeply sensitive to the contingency of the event itself (There are no great expectations for this Pip.)

Pip's madness is not exactly the same as that of Shakespeare's fools, though like the fool of Lear he imparts great wisdom to who- ever will listen, especially to Ahah, the king of evil signification.

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When Ahah sees poor mad Pip berating his absent self, he is touched to the heart, as he is untouched by any other. He makes Pip his constant companion in the captain's cabin untu the moment he goes to his final confrontation with the white whale. Ahab admits that his love of Pip, even more than his love of Starbuck, is the last barrier he must surmount to confront the whale. His love of Starbuck is born of one identity —that of the father and husband: his love of Pip is born of another—that of a common abjection. He recognizes how Pip's deep sympathy balances him, distracting him firom his monomania, and thus put- ting at risk his ultimate goal. When he prepares to leave Pip, he explains, "There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing of my malady. Like cures Hke, and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health." (C129) Pip protests, urging Ahab to use "poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye." Pip's recourse to the use of the first person here is a sign of his possible healing, his hope to return to some integration of his self w îth another. Pip's absence becomes Ahab's presence, the way Ahab is able to begin to gain perspective on his monomania. But because he is more wedded to his w ĥale than to his life, Ahab must leave Pip, leave him alone, more alone than any living soul on the Pequod, deserted first by Stubb, and now not only by Ahab, but by him- self. Upon Ahab's final departure, Pip says, "Here this instant he stood; I stand in his air—but I'm alone. Now^ ŵ ere even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he's missing. Pip, Pip!" (C129) Hence Pip finally and forever abandons his use of the first person. How more alone can anyone be than to be missing himself as he stands in the air of another? This doubly absent self is yet another clue, for we may ask, who is speaking here? Pip is gone, who speaks in his place?

There can be no underestimating Charles Olson's contribution to our larger understanding of Moby-Dick—his discovery that the second draft of it was w r̂itten after Melville read King Lear. This evidence firmly supports the idea of the truth-teUing fool. When Pip loses his mind, he paradoxically achieves a strange objectivity, a third person perspective not uncommon to Shakespeare's fool,

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a position from which he can comment upon the cruel ironies of the unfolding tragedy. But his comments are less about Ahab his king than they are about this other loss of self in the face of the white event. Moreover, Melville provides in Pip what Shakespeare does not provide for his fool—an explanation of the genesis of his madness in abandonment. (In that sense, if Pip indeed be a fool, he may be closer to Tom of Bedlam, the heroic Edgar, than to Lear's constant companion.)

Pip anticipates Ishmael's fate, to float alone, abandoned every bit as thoroughly as Pip himself was. Is Ishmael's entire narrative as mad as Pip's? As wise? Ishmael tells the tale, the lone survivor. We may imagine him as Peretz seems to imagine him, telling this tale in the streets of Martha's Vineyard, wandering the taverns of Manhattan, urgently pressing his narrative upon passersby, cha- grined by their indifference, by their glancing recognition that Ishmael may be, hke Pip in the end, mad.

Ishmael has a secret. What is it? Pip is first abandoned at sea after being assessed as having a

worth precisely one-thirtieth the value of a whale. This observa- tion is a great catalyst for the subsequent shattering of his mind. Stubb's enunciation of the power of capital to reckon worth, underlines the all-too-present potential for Pip's descent into chattel status, the possibility of being placed on shore somewhere Hke Alabama, as opposed to his native Connecticut. As we have already noted, Pip's worth is determined by his "lay." Famously, Ishmael is the one who undergoes a protracted bargaining session with the owners of the Pequod in "The Ship" concerning the lay he is to receive for the voyage, a comical passage concerning the worth of a man. (C16) Prepared to sell his services, Pip, like all the other sauors, must sell himself for the length of his passage on the whaling boat. And if he is already owned, what is to prevent him fi-om being sold?

The Hobbesian formulation of the relationship of worth to price is a root dynamic that is played out fially in Moby-Dick. Beyond the hubris of Ahab, underwriting his madness yet apart firom it, is the constant calculation of worth that exists in com- plementary tension wdth the unfathomable value of the interior

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Hfe of the lonely self. The attempt to present equivalent values reduces the members of the crew to interchangeable parts of an infernal machine. It also intensifies the relationships that exist among the crew members as they strive to join together in a common project so as to increase the worth of each and every one, or, put negatively, to escape the harsh valuation of a failed voyage. So Hke Pip, Ishmael beHeves himself to be threatened with the possibiHty of slavery. Like Pip, Ishmael is a peeper, narrating events that could only be observed fi:om a particular position on the quarter deck of the Pequod. Like Pip, Ishmael is cast away at sea for a day and night, only fortuitously picked up by the Rachel as that ship seeks out its lost crew member. Like Pip, Ishmael is a self at a loss, brilHant and bright, a Connecticut man who has become a New Yorker of the heart no doubt, someone who imagines that upon the sea his lay wiH not be counted separately firom the lay of others.

Let me say it: the engine of Moby-Dick is the fact that Ishmael is Pip. The shattered identity of the narrator who demands or suggests or pleads that we caH him Ishmael is that which is inhabited by the least significant member of the crew of the Pequod, Pip. It is Pip who alone survives to tell the tale, cook's assistant assuming the identity of an imaginary seaman, an insignificant peeper passing -with a new identity. It is Pip who is the silent witness to the most important as well as the most trivial events on board the ship. It is Pip who demands that we call him Ishmael and claims to be a seaman, Pip w^ho imagines himself repelled by the black church he is stumbHng into, Pip ^vho claims at first to be repelled by the blackness of his eventually beloved Queequeg. It is Pip reporting on Pip's descent to the bottom of the ocean, Pip describing how he saw God's foot on the loom. Only Pip can provide witness to Pip's experience.

AH of these incidents in the reteHing of the tale assume an iron- ical, or perhaps even gothic cast. This post hoc identity can easily be understood as simply serving the cook's assistant as a good dis- guise as he observes the activities of others, as fi^om his lowly post he imagines a more elevated station for himself, as he is com- peHed into service on Stubb's boat, as his personal experience of

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the white event drives him to the dissolution of his very self, and finaHy as he becomes the closest confidant to the most important personage on the ship. The dancing, tambourine-playing, bright and brilliant artist has the sensitivity to describe in detail the ongoing drama of the Pequod, and in being a castaway anticipates the final fate of the crew, who wiH eventuaHy come to see what he has seen, the deepest depths of the sea.

Who is Pip? Let us imagine him to be as Ishmael suggests, briHiant, but let us imagine something more, perhaps something Hke this: a first son of a famous man, a child of the coupHng of master and slave, who takes the name Ishmael because that is who he is—the lost son, bastard brother, founder of the lost tribe (even if only of the aU-one of himself), neglected, first-born elder of the much-beloved legitimate son, black child of Randolph family miscegenation, he who has another tale to teH of the Patagonian crew of the counter-bibHcal, demonic, and doomed

If we imagine Pip to be Ishmael we may be able to imagine something more—the Ur-text of an American self at a loss, shattered by the tragedy of its own unravehng, unable to cope with the desperate knowledge that every self may be bought or sold, and that every measure can be reduced to the common denominator of price. Then the tale yields yet another lesson, for Pip teHs us: To be lonely in America is to be black, and briHiant, constantly in danger of being bought and sold, rooted in the deepest genealogy of power and loss, and secret witness to a catastrophe that only deepens over time.

Peretz explains that to grasp the fuHest meaning of Moby-Dick requires us to understand the fabulous character of the disaster in "the enigmatic realm of the w^hite event of address."" Ishmael's encounters with whiteness—of the whale, of Ahab, of the cries and shouts that he voiced and that blended with the voices of the rest of the crew into a white noise—give expression to an irresolvable enigma of identity in the face of the catastrophe that shatters aH possibiHty of knowing. This catastrophe is no less than

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a recognition of the overwhelming sense of life in the face of its destruction. This encounter demands our complete response. "This wounding call through which the 'me' discovers, ashamed, its Uving nudity is at the same time a singiolarizing call and that which dispossesses me, and heing exposed to it means that I both have to respond to it, call it hy name, and he responsible to it, although I do not know w ĥat it wants firom me. I also have the task of responding to who I am in fi-ont of it, that is, to justify my existence, my life, which is exposed to its judgment."'^ In the end, this responsibility and the impossihility of its resolution constitute the suhject matter of the modern novel. He writes.

This event's fabulous nature should not be understood as offering some escapist fantasy from reality, for we have seen that the white event as the origin of the fabulous is also a disastrous, traumatic event. The collapse of the "I" involved in this event is a wounding devastation which destroys the "I's" familiar and stable world. It is thus that the fabulous, the monstrous, and the disastrous open up together and are entangled in the same moment of address, linguis- tically associated with the cry

This cry is all that we have in the face of the white event, it is what sets us in motion, it is the heart of the tragedy of modernity itself. This cry, which comes in the form of a call, separates the human firom the non-human. It is a howling, the hare minimum helow which we cannot fall and still remain human.''*

It may well he that the collapse of the "I" in the face of the destruction of its world is the signature event of Moby-Dick. If that is the case, and if it also is the case that Pip is the narrator of this collapse, then his mysterious survival as Ishmael "to tell the tale" places him in a unique position to comprehend two inter- twined political problems—the status of the African American individual in a culture of enslavement, on the one hand, and the universalizing of the dissolved identity of the castaway as the avatar of lonely heing, on the other. In this sense, the undoing of the tragedy of Afî ican American experience remains the impos- sible project of American political thought, and it is the surro- gate claim that all Americans must make upon the world, in the end, to save us from ourselves. As we must accept the haunting

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of chattel slavery we must move forward to accept that we are haunted as well by the other genocides of identity and power that we have so far refused to account for or confront in our own time. For there is yet another comparison that is called forth by the experience of the lonely self of Moby-Dick, that of the ruined and mad chattel slave v̂ ath the Miisselman of the concentration camp, both existing as alternative incarnations of the contempo- rary form that bare Hfe—^what Peretz refers to as "the Hving nudity"—takes.^^

This bareness, this exposure to the nothingness of the w^hite event is the unspoken, perhaps the unspeakable, experience of the lonely self w extremis. We are bidden to feel the heart of this darkness, and yet none of us can speak it. The call of the white event plays itself out in the secular history of the Western lands through the active witnessing of a history combined with a sub- jective stepping outside it, participating, waiHng as a witness and yet prophetically imagining an overcoming of that very history. What Americans have a greater claim to have known the white event than those who experienced the Middle Passage? Torn fi-om their families, transported in shackles to the western shore of Afirica, thrown into the black hole of the hold of the slave ship, sailed across an unknown ocean to an unknown land, shattered both physically and psychically, wailing in the face of an unspeakable and interminable transit, these African immigrants of a different sort came to the eastern shores and gave decisive shape to culture. They prepared us to know the horror lurking here, the malice at the root. The American sublime—for this is what we may call the experience of the white event—has come to haunt the entire world. If not the figures of Vietnamese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, Amerindians, in older adventures of empire, then the new figures of inmates in the colonial prison of Abu Ghraib crystaUize the enormity of the white event into a single image, make those claims contemporary, and warn us of the larger catastrophe awaiting the empire we have forgetfully made.

Howr are we to comprehend Pip's madness in reference to this catastrophe? Pip floats to the bottom of the existential ocean to

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witness the expanse of godly wisdom. His descent allows him to see beyond reason, he is able to see behind the mask, "the unwarped primal world."'* "So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and w^ondering firom all mortal reason; man comes at last to that celestial thought, which to reason, is absurd and fi^antic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indiflerent as his God." (C93) In his cosmic indifference, Pip is able to wdtness all, and to speak of God's foot upon the loom. But what does he witness? He dis- solves into an observer of himself, perfectly lonely. He is ever after a third person. "Where's Pip?" he asks, not knowing this one thing. It is only as Ishmael that he is able to answer the question. That means that he is no longer Pip, that Pip, if present in bodily form, has been absorbed into this new and other identity. This is the schizoid split enacted by the lonely self, the operation that allows you to talk about yourself as though you weren't even there. Pip is the terminus of the Cartesian self.

Pip disappears into this other self who wants to be called Ishmael. He is lost. But what does this mean? Is there a ghostly survival here, a haunting of Ishmael by Pip, and a haunting of all of American literature as a consequence? And if so, how can this literature of the marginal help to us in understanding the abject experience of this lonely, insignificant being? If we identify the emergence of Ishmael from the ruins of Pip, we may be able to locate another movement within a larger pohtical narrative, another struggle over the fate of the lonely self at wit's end. To put it in the form of a question, what happens when this most marginal of characters enters the heart of our experience as political subjects?

Perhaps I need to be reminded that Pip is a figment of the imagination of the writer Herman Melville, who would him- self die in obscurity, with no one listening to his urgent and mad stories, his own expressions of an obscure desire to be rid of his lonely self. Pip is no one. Pip is alone, the "aU-one," the deep thought-diver, caU him Ishmael, lost brother, invisible man, spUt, schizoid, least body on the good ship Pequod, eyewitness to the

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white event, floating in the sea, cHnging to the coffin of his one imagined firiend, mad, lost, the lonely self. As we bear witness to him, we witness our ow n̂ ghosts, our own lost and pitiful selves. Consider Pip. This is w^hat it is to be lonely in America.

NOTES

^The author wishes to thank Catherine Holland, Tess Taylor, Chip Turner, and Kim Townsend for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts.

2Eyal Peretz, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Mohy- Dick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 36.

3Ibid., 37. 4Ibid., 39. 51 have tried to suggest something similar to this view in an earlier foray

into reading Moby-Dick, but Peretz has done much more to clarify the mat- ter by focusing so specifically on questions concerning the witnessing pow- ers of Ishmael and their connection to MelviUe's authorial intent. See Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: New York University Press,, 1999), Chapter One.

ÂU direct references to Moby-Dick are to specific chapters. Cl is Chapter One, etc. I use the University of California reissue of the Arion Press limited edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).This text is based on the critical edition of Moby-Dick prepared for Northw^estern University Press by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. I use this text as well for its precise illustrations of the whaling ship provided by Barry Moser, which help ulustrate the argument I wdsh to make concerning the identity of Ishmael.

''My thanks to Tess Taylor for sharing with me her insights into the history of Randolph family and in particular for pointing out this important passage.

»Op. cit., Peretz, 131-132, notes 4 and 7. 9Ibid., 39. lOWe may also note that this shape shifting in identity becomes a more

explicit theme in Melville's The Confidence Man. »Op. cit., Peretz, 87. i2Ibid., 86. i3Ibid., 88. ^^For a more lengthy discussion of the howl, see Thomas L. Dumm,

"Wolfinan and the Fate of Deinocradc Culture: Four Fragments," JoHma/ of Law, Culture and Humanities, 1.2 (Spring, 2005).

'^On bare Hfe, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Transcripts of Auschwitz (New York: ZONE Books, 2001).

i^Dumm, y4 Politics of the Ori/inary, 34.The desire of Ahab to strike behind the mask is his desire to touch reality. But touching is not seeing.

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