Ishmael's clash with God: Part 2 of a look at Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
FILE PHOTO Richard Basehart (second from left) plays narrator Ishmael in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick.
Moby-Dick begins with this curious sentence: "Call me Ishmael." As readers, we have to accept that invitation into what will soon become a book of mysteries and challenges. 'Who is this Ishmael?' we ask. How do we relate to him? And can we trust him? His name suggests exile and loss of home, but he refuses to tell us much about his life. As to the time line, he adds "Some years ago, never mind how long precisely." With Ishmael we encounter indefiniteness, but we also feel ourselves in very good company. He is an amiable, inquisitive, and knowledgeable; even his dark moods speaks compellingly to us.
So informed, we agree to 'call him Ishmael' and accept him as our guide into the experience and science of whaling in the mid-19th century, and into Captain Ahab's obsessive and destructive pursuit of the great white whale. He is also our guide to an immersion in multiculturalism, comparative religion, the nature of tragedy, and the study of evil. In fact, religious matters are always close to the novel's action. One of my long-ago professors, Lawrance Thompson, wrote a critical study called Melville's Quarrel with God. I borrow from his title in offering my take on Ishmael. Melville was very conscious of the depths and varieties of religious meaning that he was challenging in his novel. "I have written a wicked book," he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, "and I feel as innocent as a lamb."
Ishmael knows a wide range of emotions. Moreover, he is a young man with an enquiring mind. He uses a character named Bulkington to measure the pursuit of imaginative and personal freedom in a world that oft-times provides little refuge or succor. "Know ye now, Bulkington?" asks Ishmael in Ch. 23, "Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?" Moby-Dick seeks to show the glory and danger of "open independence" while individuals seek to elude the siren calls of the "slavish shore."
It is why Ishmael himself chooses to go to sea. "Whenever I feel myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; "¦ I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Once at sea, like Bulkington, he finds an open and wide space for living and thinking. "Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, [seek out] a metaphysical professor," he suggests. "Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever" (Ch. 1). Everywhere one turns in the novel, Melville's evocative prose rises up to be admired.
Ishmael is a seaman and a bookman, a sort of sub-librarian of the universe. "I love all men who dive," he told Hawthorne. "Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more"¦. I am talking about the whole core of thought divers that have been diving and coming up with blood-shot eyes since the world began." And so Melville and Ishmael dive, seeing metaphors everywhere in water and in air, and keeping readers like me fascinated.
We watch Captain Ahab as he mesmerizes his crew to support his quest to track down and kill the white whale, bent as he is on revenging himself on the leviathan that nearly killed him years before. "[W]ild Ahab" is a grand and tragic figure for Ishmael, but from his first appearance we are led to wonder whether he is heroic or megalomaniac? Is he wise or is he mad? Ishmael's memorable equation--"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness" (Ch. 96) haunts his view of the Captain. In his pain and anger Ahab has become an absolutist who cares not whether the white whale is the agent of evil on this earth or its "principal" incarnation- he must have his revenge. And so in the process he sinks his ship just as many absolutists in history have sunk theirs. "All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down"¦" (Ch. 41).
But our man is Ishmael. While he stands in awe of Ahab's obsessive quest, he keeps apart from him. Shipmates like the harpooner Queequeg, first-mate Starbuck and pipe-smoking Stubb help him to preserve his intellectual and emotional distance. Many of the novel's most intriguing chapters have to do with Ishmael's perceptions of human activity from a sea-going perspective. Readers who are not too bent on seeing the narrative quickly through to its end are enthralled by Melville's skill in making matters of whaling and whale physiology fascinating and pertinent. Such chapters are rich in analogy and rhetorical flourishes
Take two examples. "Fast Fish and Loose Fish" (Ch. 89) has to do with the legal and moral interpretations of who at sea owns a whale once it has broken free after being injured or killed. Melville makes the two terms luminous metaphors for kinds of humanity--those who become fixed to and enslaved and those who seek to maintain an open and thought-diving view. The metaphor works brilliantly for individuals, nations and religions, circa 1851. "What to that redoubted harpooner, John Bull [England], is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan [America], is Texas but a Fast-Fish? "¦ What all men's minds and opinions but loose-Fish? "¦ And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"
In "The Try-Works" (Ch. 96), Ishmael to look down at night from the tiller of the Pequod into the large pots where the whale blubber is boiling down to oil. The experience is thought-provoking. It leads him to ponder the power of blackness and to wonder about the trustworthiness of our human optimism. He wisely warns, "Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm!" Nevertheless, his conclusion is disturbing: "that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped." Better, if possible, to be a "mountain eagle"; "some souls" he suggests, "can alike dive down into the darkest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces."
Moby-Dick invites us to be loose-fish, to soar like mountain eagles and to avoid the Ahabs of this world.
Reach Michael Peterman, professor emeritus of English literature at Trent University, at mpeterman@trentu.ca
