novel of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Ahab's Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus Author(s): Thomas Woodson Source: ELH, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sep., 1966), pp. 351-369 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872112 Accessed: 19-06-2018 12:47 UTC

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AHAB'S GREATNESS: PROMETHEUS AS NARCISSUS

BY THOMAS WOODSON

In the popular mind Moby-Dick has always been Ahab's book. A spectacular, melodramatic old sea captain, a literary cousin of Long John Silver and Captain Hook, embarks on an excitingly fateful voyage of revenge. Of course he is thwarted, but after all he is not likeable enough to succeed. The reader's vicarious daring is satisfied and his awe of the white whale lingers on.

Literary critics, more concerned with the intellectual issues raised by Melville's art than with the adventurous plot, have turned their attention from Ahab to Ishmael, the author's nar- rator and spokesman. Ahab, who at first seemed an arch-romantic self-projection, we now tend to see as a case-study of Romantic "madness," an American counterpart of the Victorian monstrous egotist typified by Emily Bronte's Heathcliff. He is also seen as an incarnation of the Romantic " dark " hero, rebellious towards the bourgeois world, alienated from the comforts of traditional faith, pitting himself against all obstacles to reach and rifle the secrets of the Infinite and Absolute. He is most frequently com- pared to Milton's Satan, Byron's Manfred and Goethe's Faust. Such a figure calls forth ethical judgments, most often unfavorable ones. The archaic Elizabethan rhetoric Melville has put in Ahab's mouth brings to mind such morally excessive hero-villains as Macbeth and Richard III, Tamerlane and Faustus. Various writers have accused Ahab of embodying the dark Puritan hatred of nature, the nineteenth-century capitalist greed for forceful acquisition, and even the insane persuasiveness of a twentieth- century dictator.

All these characterizations are certainly just in some measure; Ishmael's more prudential and speculative approach to the voy- age allows us to accept the horrible truths of the story with a greater hopefulness and self-respect than if Ahab completely dominated our perception of it. But we still have to come to terms with Ahab. To dismiss him as a madman, a Satan or a Byronic egotist is too simple. For instance, much has been made

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of his Biblical name; " Ahab of old," says Peleg to Ishmael, " was a crowned King! " and Ishmael answers: " And a very vile one. When that wicked King was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood? '" But in many ways our Ahab is no more com- parable with the Old Testament schemer and murderer than is Ishmael with his primal namesake, whose hand was to be against every man, and who signaled his bitterness by mocking God. Ishmael insists that Ahab is a great man, a tragic hero; it seems appropriate here to reexamine his character with sympathy to- wards this judgment, leaving the ethical atmosphere in the back- ground, and concentrating on what actually is said about him in Ishmael's narrative and in his own words.

The most fruitful starting-point for study of Ahab's per- sonality is not, perhaps, Captain Peleg's description of him to Ishmael, but Ishmael's later meditation on the hierarchy of rank on a whaler (Chapter XXXIII, " The Specksynder ") . Ishmael observes that Ahab "sometimes masked himself" behind the "forms and usages of rank, the " external arts of practical power, but that these are not the true index of his greatness. Ishmael speaks here in his role as " tragic dramatist " rather than as plebeian observer of his dictatorial captain. As a dramatist he struggles to put into words what haunts him still about Ahab: "But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nan- tucket grimness and shagginess; . . . I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, there- fore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!" (p. 199.) It would be possible to take the last phrases of this statement ironically, were it not for Ishmael's obvious preference for democratic " shagginess " over " majestical trappings." Ahab's true greatness will not be contained or ex- posed in forms, trappings, housings. It is harder to find, but (Ishmael's urgent tone insists) it must be found.

The angle of approach to Ahab I am proposing depends upon the ramifications of these phrases: " plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! " What is really vital is Ahab's relationship to the great forces of

' Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr. (Indianapolis, 1964), p. 119. All subsequent page references to Moby-Dick, most of which are incorporated into the text, are to this edition.

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nature; Ishmael can only know Ahab through the " bold and nervous lofty language" which, he has already told us, Ahab himself learned by " receiving all nature's sweet or savage impres- sions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast," thereby becoming " a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies" (Chapter XVI, " The Ship," p. 111) . Ahab was " formed" by the language of nature, but this is a different kind of " form " than that given by human culture. Paradoxically, nature's language seems not available to man, since Ishmael finds no cc voluntary and confiding breast " from which to learn it, but only the empty immensities of sea and sky. He must "c pluck " and " dive" for knowledge which he mistakenly presumes Ahab to possess already.

Above all, Ishmael must " feature " Ahab's greatness " in the unbodied air." He must create verbally a face for Ahab in the unsubstantial, phantasmal world of the air. Much later Ahab announces defiantly that he does in fact exist in the mode Ishmael here prescribes for him. "c In the midst of the personified imper- sonal, a personality stands here" (Chapter CXIX, ""The Can- dles," p. 641). Man must affirm his own uniqueness in order to exist as man. This affirmation is of itself heroic and tragic, both for character and dramatist.

Thus Ishmael links himself to Ahab in an underlying way. Ahab's self-assertion, however excessive and immoral in social terms, is necessary to the imaginative logic of the novel. Ishmael's plucking and diving to feature him are verbal counterparts of Ahab's destructive quest for Moby-Dick. In this sense Mel- ville, standing behind Ishmael directly and Ahab obliquely, has "written a wicked book."2 And Ishmael's desperate search for words is really parallel to Ahab's "bold and nervous lofty lan- guage" which, as we soon learn, has not brought him definite knowledge of nature's secrets: the virgin teases and deludes; she " absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover noth-

' There are, of course, many passages in Moby-Dick which will not support the intensity of tone I evoke here. Ishmael plays other roles, and other characters occa- sionally divert us from Ahab's moral centrality. But Melville's famous remarks to Hawthorne about his " secret motto " and " wicked book " indicate Ahab's importance to him. My emphasis here on the common problems of Ahab, Ishmael and Melville is anticipated (as are other aspects of my argument) by Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), pp. 27-35. I am further indebted for com- ments and suggestions to my colleagues William Charvat, Julian Markels and Joan Webber.

Thomas Woodson

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ing but the charnel-house within " (Chapter XLII, " The White- ness of the Whale," p. 264). Ahab, addressing the captured whale's head, senses the inadequacy of all human language to the problem he insists on solving: "0 Nature, and 0 soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! (Chapter LXX, " The Sphynx," p. 406) . Similarly, Ishmael, after an extended essay on the featureless face of the whale, gives up in despair: ". . . how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can." (Chapter LXXIX, " The Praire," p. 449).3

Ahab's most extended statement of his problem, it is univer- sally recognized, comes in the " Quarterdeck " chapter. Insisting to Starbuck that he is intent on more than "vengeance on a dumb brute," Ahab reveals his belief that ". . . in each event . . . in the living act, the undoubted deed . . . there, some

unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask" (p. 220). He goes on to characterize Moby-Dick as " the unreasoning mask," the white wall which Nature has " shoved near" to him. Nature's intelligent creativity, then, is not the body of the whale but the essential " features " of itself which it seems to reveal in a mys- terious way "from behind." If we can trust Melville's use of " features " here to correspond to " featured " in the passage about Ahab's greatness, both whale and whale-hunter possess a hidden and ultimately dynamic existence; Ahab in chasing Moby-Dick feels himself to be " thrusting through the wall," the " pasteboard mask" of mere external form. Ishmael in writing about Ahab, feels he must " pluck " and " dive in sky and sea to understand the real Ahab behind the mask of " forms and usages."

Ahab talks of the " mouldings " of Nature's essential features. This curious word seems to mean the forming power, that which creates patterns and forms in matter. The word is typical of the stylistic idiosyncracy of Moby-Dick Thornton Wilder has pointed to, Melville's coinage of plural gerunds.4 I would guess that Melville's choice of " mouldings " in this context stems from

3 Ishmael also comments on the formlessness of the whale's appearance and the consequent impossibility of understanding it in Chapter LV, " Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales," p. 352; and Chapter LXXXVI, " The Tail," p. 486.

4Thornton Wilder, " Towards an American Language," Atlantic Monthly, CXC (July, 1952), 36.

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his reading of King Lear, and particularly from Lear's magnificent apostrophe to the elements during the storm on the heath in Act III scene 2:

You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack Nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man!

While Lear's speech is tonally closer to Ahab's address to the fire in the " Candles " chapter much later, Ahab here implies a similar " thought-executing " violence: " the living act, the un- doubted deed " he soon explains as " the unrecking and unwor- shipping things that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! "

According to this evidence Ahab, no less than Ishmael, is a Romantic naturalist believer in an interflow of spiritual and mental energy between the human mind as perceiver and the phenomena of nature as the objects of perception. While nature may appear as an impenetrable mystery (epitomized by the " unbodied air"), unsubstantial and " impersonal," it is also the mask-like creation of " some unknown but still reasoning thing," which " moulds " and gives body and form to it. The " imper- sonal " is " personified," Ahab puts it in the " Candles " chapter. Hence Ahab's quest for Moby-Dick, in whom he has found that " all the subtle demonisms of life and thought . . . were visibly personified, and made practicably assailable" (Chapter XLI, " Moby-Dick," p. 247). Ahab's " mad " purpose is to de- stroy that which he seeks. In this he responds to the power of nature as he understands it. To live, to create a substantial body for oneself, is to destroy the other: man finds behind nature a competing mind and creative force; in order to become himself, man must destroy this competing other. To repeat and complete a quotation from Ahab I gave earlier: " 0 Nature, and 0 soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind" (p. 406). Although Ahab seems here only to endorse an orthodox Romantic faith in the interinanimation of mind and nature (for example, Emerson's "Me" and "Not- Me "), by avoiding the syntactic parallel of " matter " to " mind," by claiming that each atom " lives on matter," he announces: his

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belief that to live (to " stir ") is to destroy, to feed on that which is outside the self. Ishmael comes to understand this outlook in a much more general way when he speaks of the " universal can- nibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began " (Chapter LVIII, " Brit," p. 364). But for Ahab the mind is a cannibal as well as the body. And perhaps the greatest of Melville's achievements in writing Moby-Dick is to make us see in Ahab the naked drama- tic identity of creative and destructive impulses within the human soul.

The notion that nature can be treacherously destructive is cer- tainly not Ahab's secret-all the characters, even Starbuck, earnestly subscribe to it-but only Ahab sees it as a challenge to the essence of his being. It would be possible to show how each of the other voyagers refuses to see what Ahab sees, but it seems best to let one extreme case illustrate Melville's thinking about the opposite alternative'to the personality of Ahab: the carpenter, whose breadth of experience leads Ishmael to wonder if he pos- sesses " some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not pre- cisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness

. ." (Chapter CVII, " The Carpenter," p. 595). The carpenter's stolidity is a kind of muteness, an inability to express himself (evidenced in the next chapter by his soliloquy, which says noth- ing) . The carpenter is "the personified impersonal" in human form. Ahab addresses him half-mockingly as " manmaker " and " Prometheus," requesting him to construct a heartless mechani- cal man with " about a quarter acre of fine brains ": a creation which, because of its inhumanity, could withstand the malicious power of nature.5 Similarly, as the chase nears its end Ahab sees the entire crew, and particularly his direct subordinates Starbuck

For a different view of this passage, see Richard Chase, Hermant Mdeville (New York, 1949), pp. 47-48. According to Chase, Ahab willingly transforms himself into a mechanical monster. But Ahab's heavy, mockingly ironic tone indicates to me that he rejects the mechanical man as a grim joke.

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and Stubb as " mechanical " men, mere metallic instruments of his own will encountering the opposing will embodied in Moby- Dick.6

One phrase in Melville's description of the carpenter is particu- larly interesting: " the surrounding infinite of things." Whereas Ahab's greatness was to be "featured in the unbodied air," the carpenter's " impersonality" shades off into a world of bodies without sensible life. While Ahab is to become more human, more tragic, as he emerges from the infinite dead world of matter, the carpenter fades out of view back into this world, into the mean- inglessness Ishmael contemplated in " The Whiteness of the Whale " as the " colorless, all-color of atheism before which we shrink " (Chapter XLII, p. 264).

In making this distinction between Ahab and the carpenter I have assumed an opposition in meaning between " personality" and " things." 7 It would follow from the whole pressure of West- ern intellectual history-from Descartes and Locke toi Hume and Kant to Coleridge and Emerson-that Melville would accept the assumption of a cleavage between mind and matter. The " Descar- tian vortices" Ishmael discovers in the sea from " The Mast- head," as well as Ahab's comments on " linked analogies," support this conclusion. But a close reading of Moby-Dick brings out interesting information about Melville's use of the word " thing," and particularly about that word when it is put in Ahab's mouth. For example, to go back to the " Quarterdeck'" passage, he there

6 See pp. 674, 697, 707. ' It is true that the English language did not demand in Melville's day, any more

than it does now, such an opposition. While the OED gives a definition of " thing " as " a being without life or consciousness, an inanimate object, as distinguished from a person or living creature," it also gives much more general definitions, e. g.: " That which exists individually (in the most general sense, in fact or in idea); that which may be in any way an object of perception . . . ; a being, an entity (including per- sons, when personality is not considered)."

A concordance to Moby-Dick would probably reveal that in a majority of instances Melville uses " thing " in a general, innocuous way. But even in casual usage " thing " seems naturally to oppose whatever is essentially human, as in Emerson's dictum: " The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul." The tone here is not far from that of another Emersonian phrase: " the ghastly reality of things." An inter- esting case where the casual meaning becomes suddenly serious is this moment in Emerson's " Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing ":

Boston Bay and Bunker Hill Would serve things still; Things are of the snake.

All the major American Romantic writers seem to have been aware of this potential explosiveness in style.

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describes his cosmic opponent as " some unknown but still rea- soning thing," repeating the word a few sentences later: "that inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him " (p. 221). In terms of my distinction, a " reasoning thing" is a contradiction. But again, a bit later in the same speech he speaks of the pagan sailors as " unrecking and unwor- shipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the life they feel " (p. 222). Once more, in the same chapter, Ahab overcomes the objecting minds of Starbuck, Stubb and Flask: " It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accu- mulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. . . . 'In vain!' cried Ahab; 'but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired from out me . . .'" (p. 224). The last of these instances seems to obliterate any clear separation between Ahab (" I," " a personality ") and his enemy world (" the unbodied air," " the surrounding infinite of things ") . The word " thing " connotes a vagueness which defies my effort to catch and define it, unless Ahab himself contains the malicious, inscrutable force he opposes. The power within him is described as vaguely as the power of nature (" some nameless, interior volition"), and the imagery pictures his mind as a mechanical force, a magnet, an " electric thing" which shocks in a thoroughly physical manner.

Is Ahab a " thing? " Is he simply a source of physical energy, a spark of voltage opposing a similar electrical charge housed in Moby-Dick? If so, my previous defense of Ahab's humanity is invalid. The various metaphors and similes Melville uses in describing Ahab give abundant support to our seeing a consistent- ently " mechanical " Ahab. Early in the book he is compared to a cannonball, a pyramid, a mortar, a railway train, a hurricane, and a tornado. Later we see him as a javelin, a harpoon, an anvil, a scythe, a mechanical vice, a seam of iron, a piece of steel.8 At a crucial point in the final chase of Moby-Dick he sees himself as " a braver thing-a nobler thing" than the wind (p. 710).

Nevertheless, Ahab's greatness consists in his selfhood, his

8Pp. 173, 176, 247, 227, 222, 298; 548, 682, 670, 686, 614, 619, 713.

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humanity. He fascinates us as a character partially because his literary integrity, his identity as a personality, is so consistently in danger of destroying itself. Aware that he destroys the spiritual independence of Starbuck and Stubb, he further recognizes the inhumanly destructive " thing" within himself. He contains within himself the fierce, wild energy of nature. It is no sterile convention of epic style which leads Melville to compare Ahab to a giant tree, to a mountain, a river, a volcanic crater and, finally to the sea itself.9 All these are substantial bodies which can " fea- ture " the book's hero " in the unbodied air," though none of them can exhaust his meaning or reach to his essence.

Ishmael confessed to looking forward with dismay to his task of characterizing and explaining Ahab. After the crucial " Quar- terdeck " scene he devotes several chapters to an analysis of Ahab's purpose and of what can be said about his opponent, the White Whale. This analysis concludes with " The Chart," a chap- ter which relates Ahab's private goals to those of the crew, and which ends by characterizing him as " a Prometheus." Since so many interpretations (including this one) of Moby-Dick rely so heavily on that mythological identification, it should be worth- while to quote and examine the entire paragraph carefully:

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intoler- ably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phren- sies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weak- ness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unap- peasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching

" E. g., pp. 169, 171, 644, 675-676; 171; 248, 614; 682; 713.

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contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yield- ing up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purposes that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and un- fathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and there- fore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. (pp. 271-272)

This is a difficult passage to follow, primarily because of the clumsiness of the grammatical references and the abstractness of Melville's distinction between " characterizing mind" and " eter- nal living principle or soul." '- Behind the passage seems to be a distinction between thinking and feeling, some such psycho- logical insight as Hawthorne's famous (and sometimes confusing) separation of " head " and " heart." But this rhetorical overflow of qualifications blunts the clarity of the distinction; the repeated " which's," " this's," " these's " and " the latter " make the pas- sage difficult reading; it is hard to tell which idea is subject of a given clause, and which is object. To make matters worse, the soul is first an " agent," then a " principle "; Ahab's " tormented spirit " (presumably the soul), glares from his " bodily eyes," but his body (or is it his soul?) is at the same moment " a vacated thing.'"

Even so, the general sense of the characterization is clear. Ahab's " one supreme purpose " (destroying Moby-Dick) attains " a kind of self-assured, independent being " which takes control of his " characterizing mind." This mind is a fire, imaged as the chasm of hell "from which forked flames and lightning shot up "; this mind can "grimly live and burn "-its life is its self-consum- ing burning, while the soul, " the eternal living principle," "' the common vitality," escapes as the body of Ahab escapes from the confinement of the cabin and the bed " that was on fire."

"0 For an analysis of this paragraph which focuses on Ishmael's epistemological problems, see Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., Ishmael's White World: A Phenomenological Readd- ing of Moby Dick (New Haven, 1965), pp. 62-81.

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The passage does not make clear whether the mind or the soul is the real Ahab. Is the soul " a vacated thing," and the mind a " frantic thing? " Has his mind driven his soul out of his being in a Faustian bargain for power and intellectual strength? Then the mind is " vacated " by the soul, and is a " blankness in itself " because it cannot " color" the moral life of conscience. As his thoughts become dreams, they are no longer controlled by his "characterizing mind," and flood over his reasoning, "charting" abilities; he becomes " a formless somnambulistic being," a sub- ject parallel in meaning to the object Ishmael originally despaired of " featuring."

If my speculations here seem as tortured as Melville's prose, it is to contend that Ahab as Prometheus is not simply a devil who has lost what Captain Peleg called " his humanities." Ahab is a divided man, self-alienated and confused by the very uncer- tainty of his relation to his world. Just as Ahab here (or an aspect of him) is ".'a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color," so the verbal process which gradually forms the book Moby-Dick is a ray of living light searching frantically to make language form something out of itself.

Ahab is Prometheus, not stealing fire from the gods, but suffer- ing the agony of an internal vulture. In fact, Melville's version of the myth is peculiarly Romantic and modern in that all the action is internalized-the fire and the vulture both exist within the hero's mind. The vulture is Ahab's purpose, which destroys him; but the object of the quest, the humanizing fire, is synonymous with the vulture. It is the essence of Ahab's experience that man is frustrated by an inadequacy within himself; either he fails utterly to join himself to an external significance, to a " reason- ing thing which " features " itself, and his " ray of living light " becomes "a blankness in itself "; or life allows an easy, sliding, deceptive identification and fusing of mind and thing, as self be- comes " thing," and the light becomes the fire and the vulture both, collapsing all life-giving distinctiveness in a suicidal can- nibalism.

It is on these terms, it seems to me, that Ahab becomes one of the most interesting of Romantic intellectual heroes. Nineteenth- century man, so earnestly obsessed with extending his mental and physical control over all the vast deserts and oceans of the planet, confronts more starkly than his predecessors the otherness of na- ture, and part of him recoils in terror. At the same time he

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exuberantly revives his faith in irrational knowledge, in the mys- terious correspondence of mind and matter; he absorbs nature into himself, coloring it with his own spirit: the result is solipsism. Ahab is peculiar in that he carries on both of these processes with full awareness of the dangers of both. He is a Prometheus whose fire consumes him; carrying out Ishmael's prophecy from the first chapter, he is also a Narcissus, " who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned " (p. 26).

An important imaginative tendency in Moby-Dick is, then, the tormenting identification and fusion of Ahab with Moby-Dick. Out of his " tormented sleep " Ahab once imagines himself as successfully completing his. purpose: " Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last! " (Chapter CXXIII, " The Musket," p. 652.) To " clutch " the whale's heart is like (too much like) " grasp- ing'" the self-image in the fountain, just as Melville must have felt it to be agonizingly like " plucking " Ahab's greatness from the skies. Life, Ishmael tells us, is an " ungraspable phantom "; Ahab knows this; he admires the carpenter's vice, pinching his hand in it, because " I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man" (Chapter CVIII, " Ahab and the Carpenter," p. 598). But later he laments in soliloquy: " Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? " (Chapter CXXVII, " The Deck," p. 666). Hence his obsession with " things," though they be " inscrutable " or " unknown but still reasoning," as in the " Quarterdeck " chapter. If " thoughts " and " things " can connect and unite, without denying the separateness of each other, then Ahab is himself substantially real. But Ahab is haunted by the unknowability of " things," and turns desperately to solipsism. He asks the carpenter: " How dost thou know, that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetrat- ingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and stand- ing there in thy spite? " (Chapter CVIII, " Ahab and the Car- penter," p. 600) . Here the " vacated thing," the blankness " of a self-consuming Prometheus, and the haunting phantom of a tor- mented Narcissus become one.

Ahab's desperate defiance, I have implied, is really an intimate part of Melville's own urge to write Moby-Dick. It is under- standable that a writer grappling with such a problem should resort to a turbulent, sometimes logically incoherent style. Alfred

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Kazin, in a brilliant " introduction" to the book's meaning, has noted in the style a " peculiarly loping quality, as if it were con- stantly looking for connectives, since on the subject of the whale no single word or statement is enough." 11 Thorton Wilder's obser- vation about Melville's coinage of verbal nouns and adjectival adverbs (". . . the whale shed off enticings," ". . . the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast," pp. 690, 722, italics mine), points to a similar purpose: the style converts naming words (nouns, adjectives) into actions (verbs, adverbs), trying to bring every object to life, desperately projecting animation into " things " and fighting the " blankness " it senses within itself.

It is in the characterization of Ahab that we notice the mocking trickiness of language as it strives to thwart the style's affirmative urge. Peleg's description of him as a " grand, ungodly, god-like man " (p. 119) begins this pattern by both affirming and denying Ahab's grasping of the divine. He is " god-like " (and Prome- thean) in that he creates his own image of the world, but is " ungodly " in that he rebels against his existence as a creature of forces beyond his control. The same sort of word-play mocks him in the final sentence of the passage on his " intolerably vivid dreams of the night ": . . . thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; . . . that vulture the very creature he creates." Stylis-- tically Ahab's tragedy consists in his failure to keep saying "I " meaningfully; striving to remain the grammatical subject of his world, who acts upon objects or " things " and creates or destroys them, he constantly lapses into the passivity of an object, acted upon, created or destroyed. Early in the book he defines his iden- tity by playing with the word which tells what Moby-Dick has done to him: " I now prophesy that I will dismember my dis- memberer " (Chapter XXXVII, " Sunset," p. 226-227). A mo- ment earlier in the same soliloquy, he attempts to convert the creaturely connotations of " madness " into independent creative action: " They think me mad-Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened. That wild madness that's only calm to understand itself." In these moments of bravado he thinks he understands himself by enlisting language against the " per- sonified impersonal " opposing him. But actually he is continually

" Alfred Kazin, " Introduction " to the Riverside Edition of Moby-Dick (Boston, 1956); reprinted in Contemporaries (Boston, 19692) and in Mdville: A Collection of Criticat Essays, ed. Richard Chase (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 47.

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in doubt of his identity. His own name mocks and haunts him, as he gradually comes to give it a talismanic significance. Observing the symbols on the doubloon, he confidently announces to himself: "All are Ahab,>" but later he is jolted by Starbuck's warning: " Let Ahab beware of Ahab." In his most profound moment of self-doubt in " The Symphony," he asks: " Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?" Finally after the second day of the chase, he reasserts his name, but now in the context of a world empty of personality, able only to be by repeating his name: " Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw-thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand-a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed " (pp. 551, 605, 685, 706-707). This spectrum of statements reveals the word " Ahab " to mean " everything " (absorbing all signifi- cance into itself) or " nothing" (drained of any intrinsic mean- ing by the pull of extrinsic forces). Ahab is never sure whether he is everything or nothing. Narcissistically he says of the doub- loon, " this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself." (Chapter XCIX, p. 551.) The world cannot " solve " or understand itself, but Ahab is willing to try. The mystery of things and the mystery of self become the same problem to him.

The mocking ambiguity of language is present even in the naming of Ahab's ship, the Pequod. The fierce and warlike New England Indian tribe for which the ship is named was called by its neighboring tribes the " Pequots," or " destroyers." As Ishmael notes, the Pequots are now " as extinct as the ancient Medes ": the " destroyers " were destroyed, and the same fate awaits Ahab and his crew. The- ship itself, " a thing of trophies, a cannibal of a craft," decked out to resemble the whale it pursues, is simul- taneously a symbol of Moby-Dick and of Ahab, of the ambiguity of "destroyer" and "destroyed." There is a similar grim joke in Ishmael's characterization of the Nantucket whale-hunters as "fighting Quakers . . . Quakers with a vengeance" (Chapter XVI, " The Ship," pp. 104, 111). As a " Quaker," Ahab is sup- posed to tremble before the power of God, but as a whaler he causes the whales to tremble. But finally, of course, his destroying

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power is itself destroyed; asserting his divinity as the active sub- ject of his world he is driven back to becoming its suffering object.

Ahab finally comes to understand what is happening to him. In a conversation about " The Log and Line " with the Manxman, he says: "'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee, not thou it." As usual, Ahab thinks as a symbolist, linking the old sailor by analogy to the rope. But this very imagi- native process turns the sailor into a " thing," a creature of " life " and a grammatical object. Learning that the sailor was born " in the little rocky Isle of Man," Ahab continues his symbolic specu- lations, unable to resist the pun which makes them universal and personal: " Here's a man from Man; a man born in once inde- pendent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in- by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquir- ing heads at last . . ." (Chapter CXXV, pp. 657-658). It is interesting that the " dead, blind wall " (identified in " The Quar- terdeck " with Moby-Dick) is now actively " butting," no longer merely an obstacle to be thrust through to reach the " unknown but still reasoning thing." Later, at the conclusion of the chase, "the solid white buttress" of Moby-Dick's forehead (another " lipless, unfeatured blank ") smites the ship's bow, and destroys it (Chapter XXXVI, pp. 220-221; Chapter CXXXV, p. 720).

It is apparent that in the later chapters of the book Ahab becomes both more and more fiercely assertive and more and more fatalistic. Critics have attacked him for inconsistency, but it seems more accurate to see him as more clearly understanding the division in himself between the humanity which wants to say "I" and the hard truth that the mirroring world makes him into a " thing." His address to the fire in " The Candles " reveals his narcissistic Prometheanism. He tells the crew: "the white flame but lights the way to the white whale," identifying fire with whale. But he needs a closer identification, out of which he can free himself from his oppressive creatureliness: " I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire." As he "fronts " the " personified impersonal," he hopes to " stand" more distinctly as a human personality, defined by his " blood against the fire. He touches the flames: " I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but

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I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes . "." Ahab recognizes the insignificance of man's self-making-

he can only " grope," can only " be ashes "; these are minimal assertions. He goes on to turn language against itself: "Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee." According to all tradi- tional symbolism darkness is formless and empty; Ahab in his despair seeks to invert this meaning, but he cannot. His dilemma is complete: to be someone, he must be nothing.

But he is heartened by his human power of speech, the power by which he has asserted the " speechless, placeless power" of the fire. He presses this advantage: " I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it." In characterizing the opposing power of nature as "unsuffusing," Ahab achieves a small victory. To suffuse is to spread, to cover, to fill the formless with substance. This the human imagination can do, but the essential force of nature cannot. Ahab accordingly concludes his speech by verbally becoming the fire, the repellant otherness he defies: "Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; de- fyingly I worship thee!" (Chapter CXIX, pp. 641-643). In this peculiar way he does " feature " himself in the " unbodied air."

Alfred Kazin has defined the unique literary effect of Moby- Dick as Melville's ability to " make you feel that he knows, as a writer, what it is like to be the eyes of the rock, the magnitude of the whale, the scalding sea, the dreams that lie buried in the Pacific. It is all, of course, seen through human eyes-yet there is in Melville a cold, final, ferocious hopelessness, a kind of ecstatic masochism, that delights in punishing man, in heaping coals on his head, in drowning him." 12 Ahab's eyes and voice are the most eloquent vehicles of this "ecstatic masochism." Melville establishes this effect through Ahab's imagery. A particularly striking pattern is one probably derived from the rural New England setting in which Melville wrote the book. Describing Moby-Dick's spout to the harpooneers, Ahab compares it to " a whole shock of wheat " (p. 219). Later Ishmael says of Ahab's

1 Kazin, Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 46.

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mutilation: " Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field " (p. 246). Through these com- parisons the man and the whale change places; they are alter- nately the mower (the destroyer of life) and the thing mowed. This ambiguity returns at the end of Ahab's poignant speech to Starbuck in " The Symphony ": " But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping. Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid green- ness, as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths . . ." (p. 685-686). Gradually, as Ahab feels his nostalgic mood dissipate into the brutal present reality of the chase, he changes from the sentient human mower into the rusting scythe, becoming only a used-up "thing" in a world of cold wintry desolation.

His despair at becoming a scythe, the instrument of the im- placable anti-human life-force, is matched and extended by the imagery of the " Chase" chapters. There, finally, Ahab identifies with the air and the sea, with the restless, aimless, eternal mo- tions of wind and waves. Whereas earlier he thought analogically, following the traditional religious identification of wind with the human breath of inspiration (" Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze," Chap- ter LXX, p. 406), now he faces the wind with primitive direct- ness as an equal force in a world of forces: " Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? . . ." (Chap- ter CXXXV, pp. 709-710). This Lear-like "madness" reveals the elemental nakedness of man's place in nature. On the last day Ahab tells Starbuck: " Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;-and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb" (p. 713). A conventional metaphor suddenly becomes a statement of identity. Ahab's human energy, he now realizes hopelessly but defiantly, has no more force upon the impenetrable rock-like nature of things than that of a momentary wall of water. He repeats the image in his final speech: " Oh, lonely death on lonely life. Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your

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furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! " (p. 721). This " one piled comber " breaks upon the whale, as the whale's " pre- destinating head " breaks upon the ship; ". . . then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." Like the ship, like the wave, Ahab's personality col- lapses, slipping back into the undifferentiated oneness of the empty sea. His vulture-like mind consumes itself; the " torment- ing, mild " image of himself he saw in the water fades as the ripples left by a dropping pebble fade into ever-widening circles. But the mighty voice remains; Ishmael still plucks at the sky and dives into the deep to make it heard.

Ahab's character is a unique feature of American Romanticism; not one or all of Poe's and Hawthorne's dark Gothic isolatoes can match him. Melville has taken the imagination far down an end- less corridor with Ahab (though he evidently intended to lead Pierre Glendinning even farther). The Ahab who stands facing the fiery corpusants is really a " representative man" (to appro- priate Emerson's phrase), as representative of the American Ro- mantic imagination as Henry Thoreau standing on the shores of Walden, announcing: " I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. . . ." Thoreau's stub- born recognition of the reality of " things " combines with his insatiable appetite for experience: cc If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow. . . . Be it life or death, we crave only reality." I' Ahab's career stems from the same faith, the same craving, but as he knows it the dividing edge is not sweet. To stare with Ahab into the heart of the fire is to see life reduced to its lowest terms with an impact Thoreau could barely imagine.

Walt Whitman sometimes felt the force of an Ahab-like nar- cissism, as in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life ":

18lHenry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," in Walden; Writings (Boston, 1906), II. 100-101, 109.

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I too Paumanok, I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float,

and been washed on your shores, I too am but a trail of drift and debris, I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped

island.

Whitman's imagination of disaster is like Thoreau's, particular and fully naturalistic. Thoreau knows what it feels like to be an animal, or a fish, or a bird; Whitman knows the pull of the infinite ocean, its power to turn a healthy body into " sea-drift," atomized "little wrecks." But only Ahab knows the ultimate emptiness on the other side of the mirror; at the end he sees him- self reduced to a billow, to a brief disturbance on the blank sur- face of " things." Like the wake of the unconquered whale, he is "a thing writ on water" (Chapter CXXXIV, p. 699). It is through Melville's awareness of such a potential evanescence in human speech itself that we should see his featuring of Ahab.

The Ohio State University

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