Katia Mitova
Moby Dick’s Double Vision and Double Vision in Moby-Dick
This essay originated as a public lecture and is structured as a lecture, with a Q & A section at
the end. Its form mimics both the shape of a sperm whale and Moby-Dick’s metafictional
qualities. The lecture focused on the epistemological and ontological complexity of human quest
for knowledge and the ways in which this complexity is reflected in the structural duality of the
novel and the narrative’s vacillating point of view. The Q & A section addresses the biblical
influences in Moby-Dick, predestination and foreshadowing, gender, and metafiction’s
receptional and generic constraints.
1. Digressions
The sperm whale, or Physeter macrocephalus – a creature more than ten times longer and about
seven hundred times heavier than a human being – provokes fear, amazement, and curiosity.
Does it provoke empathy? It surely does, passionate whale watchers may reply. But are we able
to identify with these distant giant cousins of ours? Are we able to imagine what it is like to be a
whale?
It might be easier to compare whales and humans on a basic biological level, citing just a
few points of similarity between us as mammals. The sperm whales’ life span is about 60 years;
the males achieve sexual maturity between 18 and 21, the females between 7 and 13; their
gestation time is about 14-15 months (Melville believed it was 9 months), the lactation period
lasts 4 years or more and, consequently, a female whale gives birth only once every 4-6 years.
For us, as readers of Moby-Dick, perhaps the most interesting fact about sperm whales, unknown
to Melville, is that the whale’s enormous spermaceti organ happens to be its organ of
communication. Most probably the function of this organ is to make and direct the click-like
sounds through which the whales seem to communicate.
But what are the whales talking about? The female whales, who live in family structures,
or “schools,” seem to be much more “talkative” than the independent mature males. Is it then all
about food and security? Do whales have their own small talk? Can they express affection? The
more we learn about the whales, the more we recognize that human standards may not apply: not
only can we not know what it is like to be a whale, but we cannot even begin to imagine what it
is like to be a whale. By reason of its hugeness and strangeness, the sperm whale reminds us of
the limitations of our epistemological quests of empathetically knowing what it is to be someone
or something else. Melville’s White Whale achieves even more: it sublimates those limitations.
By the monstrous and powerful yet accessible symbol of the White Whale, Melville makes us
recognize and accept the whiteness and whaleness itself – the mystery and the horror of the
unknowable.
To be precise, however, I should use the term “rationally unknowable.” For there are
other kinds of knowing that lead to knowledge of non-evidential nature, such as intuition,
mystical experience, and dreaming. The ineffability of knowledge acquired in such ways
prevents us from sharing it with others, thus leaving it unconfirmed – unless, like Melville, we
are able to use the language of poetry, which appears to be more adequate for exploring the
rationally unknowable than the language of science or philosophy.
2
This, I believe, is what Melville has effected in his novel: through the White Whale, we
are made to realize both the limitations of our rational pursuit of knowledge and the potential of
our poetic intuition. The novel underscores two kinds of epistemological limitations: we can
neither know what it is like to be a whale nor what it is like to compose “a whale of a novel.”
The hugeness of the whale comes to symbolize the hugeness of Moby-Dick as a creative project
over which the author has only limited control.
From Melville’s letters, we know that the writing of Moby-Dick was a painstaking and
labyrinthine process. Unfortunately, we cannot even hope to recreate the writing process as no
drafts have survived. Fortunately, however, this invites exciting speculations. The speculation
that I entertain has the following starting point: I imagine that through writing his famous story,
Melville experienced not what it is like to be a whale, but what it is to be making a literary
Leviathan. At first, this kind of creative labor might seem different from the fiction writers’
traditional employment – making up characters and fabulating. On second thought, however, the
making of a whale only demonstrates the awkwardness, the hubristic ambition, and the virtual
impossibility of any imitation of reality. We don’t really learn what it is like to be a whale from
Melville’s novel, and we can only play, in a more or less entertaining way, with the idea of
imagining what it is to be a dolphin or an ape. As for human characters, we feel, indeed, that we
are learning about what it is to be another human from great works of fiction. But isn’t the reason
for this learning the simple fact that we are human and thus are able to recognize our actual or
potential qualities in the fictional characters? In a sense, writers are not really making fictional
selves. Rather, they masterfully arrange and dress mirrors for their readers. Consequently, the
readers’ reception of fiction is based on self-knowledge mixed with some theoretical and
practical knowledge of literature and human psychology.
In the process of working on Moby-Dick, I imagine, Melville became acutely aware that
his writing resembled arranging mirrors between his readers and the whale. Charles Olson
believes that in July 1850, when Melville read and enthusiastically reviewed Hawthorne’s
collection Mosses from an Old Manse, he “abandoned the account of the Whale Fishery and
gambled it and himself with Ahab and the White Whale.”1 One of Hawthorne’s tales that
particularly impressed Melville was “Monsieur du Miroir” – a story about the impossibility –
even through meticulous examination – of really knowing the person one sees every day in the
mirror, or a story about the “mystical depth of meaning” and the “shape of mystery”2, as Melville
has it in his article review of Hawthorne’s book. By putting a man and a whale in the same
boxing ring, Melville lets an epistemological abyss open in his novel. Ahab and Moby Dick
belong to completely different categories with respect to their physical shape and intelligence,
yet the match will take place – the juxtaposition is thrilling precisely because of the enormous
differences. In order for Ahab and Moby Dick to face each other in a work of literature, Melville
had to imagine what it would be like to be Ishmael recollecting and imagining what it is like to
be Ahab imagining what it is like to be Moby Dick. Naturally, the White Whale’s perspective on
the great match remains a blank.
There are in Moby-Dick numerous remnants from earlier stages of the novel’s making.
Some of them could have been removed or disguised. Yet, the writer did not conceal those birth
1 Charles Olson, Call me Ishmael (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947), 38.
2 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850. Published
anonymously. Quoted from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York:
W. W. Norton Company, 2002), 521.
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traces; at least not all of them. We know that Melville was under financial pressure to publish the
novel as soon as possible: at the end of June 1850 Melville eagerly asked his English publisher,
Richard Bentley, for ₤200 advance for the copyrights.3 Almost a year later, in a letter to
Hawthorne, Melville confessed that he did not see the point to his “elaborating what, in its very
essence, is so short-lived as a modern book.”4 Nevertheless, we have reasons to believe that
Melville purposefully left clues to the earlier draft of his work rather than leaving them because
he was in a rush to publish or because he was tired of “elaborating” the novel.
Let us take the handiest and most peculiar example: the character of Bulkington. In
Chapter 3, “The Spouter-Inn,” Bulkington appears as Ishmael’s future “comrade on the sea”5 and
a character with a potential for a leading role on the Pequod and in the novel’s plot, but he is
never fulfilled as such. Tom Quirk, in his Introduction to Moby-Dick, says that “Melville does
not conceal Bulkington, he memorializes him, leaving him visible as a hinted alternative to
Ahab.”6 But why did Melville prefer to bury this fascinating character instead of developing
him? Now that we have Ahab as Moby Dick’s adversary, it is clear that Bulkington was too nice
a man to be an Ahab, too good for this “wicked book,” as Melville calls his novel in a letter to
Hawthorne.7 “This six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington,” we read in Chapter 23,
“The Lee Shore.”8 This chapter is the first digression in the novel, the first time when Ishmael’s
voice seems to be replaced by the authorial voice.
After encountering a number of birth traces in the novel, the reader may realize that,
although each of these traces has its own reason for existing, there must be some narrative
strategy behind this peculiarity of the novel, a reason for leaving those traces behind. If we read
it as a work of implicit metafiction, Melville’s novel reveals a deep harmony between form and
content. The author has given us various hints about his book’s metafictionality, most
significantly in Chapter 32, entitled “Cetology” – the branch of zoology that studies whales and
dolphins. The “Cetology” chapter concludes with the following words: “God keep me from ever
completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught.”9
Melville’s novel is certainly a story about Ishmael, and Queequeg, and Ahab, and Moby Dick.
But it is also a story about its own coming into existence. It contains a record of Melville’s
gradually blooming awareness of the complexity of the task he has undertaken and of the
aesthetic – and epistemic – value of his own creative struggle.
Melville had access to some raw material for the plot of his novel, but the novel, as we
know it, is entirely unlike anything Melville could have emulated. One of Melville’s sources is
the oral legend about the White Whale Mocha Dick that attacked ships and crushed boats with
his jaws, published in the New York paper Knickerbocker in 1839. Thomas Beale’s Natural
History of the Sperm While, acquired by Melville when his novel was “half written”10 is another
3 Melville’s letter to Richard Bentley of June 27, 1850. Ibid., 533.
4 Melville’s letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of early May, 1851. Ibid., 540.
5 Ibid., 29.
6 Andrew Delbanco, Introduction to Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Chicago: Northwestern
University Press, 1992), xvi.
7 Melville’s letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of November 17, 1851. Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford. Ibid.,
545.
8 Ibid., 97.
9 Ibid., 125.
10 Steven Olsen-Smith, “Herman Melville’s Erased Marginalia in Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm
Whale: Recovering a Source of Evidence for the Composition of Moby-Dick.” Ibid. 585.
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source of raw material. The Bible is a third source. Melville’s reading of Shakespeare seems to
have been the catalyst that nourished his ambition to go beyond the adventure story. But the
writer had no paradigm for the novel, neither a formula nor alchemic instructions to follow. His
work grew in an organic way, and “organic form is not a particular form but a structural
principle,” as Walter E. Bezanson suggests in his essay on Moby-Dick as a work of art.11
Melville himself states, “there are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
method”12 (beginning of Chapter 82, “The Honor and Glory of Whaling”). Thus, an adequate
approach to understanding and appreciating the novel Moby-Dick should involve a search for
Melville’s “careful disorderliness” as the structural principle of his literary creativity. Such an
approach would also allow us to explore the ways in which the paradoxical naturalness of this
entirely artificial realm of speaking the unspeakable and exploring the unknowable affects our
reading.
2. Head
What I have called, in the title of this lecture, “Moby Dick’s double vision,” is described in
Chapter 74, “The Sperm Whale’s Head – Contrasted View.” The narrator wonders about how
“the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of
solid head” affects the whale’s vision. The whale, the narrator continues, “must see one distinct
picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side, while all between must be profound
darkness and nothingness to him.” Let me quote more as this passage is the basis of my thesis:
A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long
as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he
cannot help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless,
any one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an
indiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him,
attentively, and completely, to examine any two things – however large or
however small – at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side
by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects
and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of
them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be
utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the
whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his
brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he
can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one
on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, is it
as marvelous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through
the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated,
is there any incongruity in this comparison.
It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by
three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such
11 Walter E. Bezanson, “Moby-Dick: Work of Art” (1953). Ibid., 656.
12 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 82.
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whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of
volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must
involve them.13
I would not propose that we analyze this description scientifically. Melville obviously
assumes that the eyes of a whale and a human have similar constitution and that in a similar
situation a man and whale would react similarly. To be sure, if different senses are involved, we
have the capacity for divided attention. For example, we can be consciously occupied with
reading Moby-Dick, listening to Beethoven, and appreciating the taste of the good red wine we
are sipping – all at the same time. But just try to focus on a different object with each eye!
Perhaps we could learn to switch very quickly from one object to another – the way jugglers and
martial artists do. But I do not know. What I have noticed, however, is that on first reading, the
narrative of Moby-Dick causes a kind of disorientation in the reader who darts around like a
whale when attacked from both sides. The reader’s attention meanders among several levels:
between the plotline and the cetology line in the narrative; between one narrative point of view
and another, especially after Ishmael ceases to be the designated narrator of the story (after
Chapter 29, “Enter Ahab”); between one idea and its opposite; between expectations and
surprises in the plot; and finally between different stylistic levels. The narrative’s vacillation is
the most fascinating feature of the novel. We do not mind getting dizzy on a rollercoaster. We
want to experience something unusual, provided that afterwards we will be able to return to our
normal existence. Making us feel a little dizzy seems to be a part of the novel’s method of
“careful disorderliness.”
3. Body
Without the digressions into cetology and the whaling industry, this would have been a
completely different book – a book about men hunting whales. The cetology/whaling line in the
narrative turns Moby-Dick into a book about man’s encounter with whaleness. This theme begins
in the second part of the novel – its “body,” so to say – after the famous Chapter 42 on “The
Whiteness of the Whale.” Most probably it was introduced after Melville acquired Thomas
Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale.
Writers research, internalize what they have learned, and let just bits of this knowledge
appear here and there in their work, to make their descriptions more truthful and convincing.
Melville, however, presented the reader with about thirty chapters of condensed information
about the sperm whale as a species and about the whaling industry. These chapters are neither
scientific nor journalistic. They present information that, paradoxically, demonstrates the limits
of our knowing the whale. We know what is necessary for killing the whale and extracting the
spermaceti. However, even by literally turning a whale’s head into light, we are not enlightened.
Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick presumes that the whale is more than a huge living body
that we can slay and cut into pieces. Recall Ahab talking to the whale’s head in Chapter 70, “The
Sphinx”: “… speak mighty head and tell us the secret thing that is in thee… O head! thou hast
seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not a syllable is thine!”14
Or, even better, the ending of Chapter 86, “The Tail”:
13 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 263.
14 Ibid., 249.
6
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not and never will.
But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much
more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back
parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shalt not be seen. But I cannot
completely make out his back; and hint what he will about his face, I say again
he has no face.15
We find ourselves in a sentry box with two separate sashes. Through one sash we observe
a human world, in which rational beings know each other by their faces and their tales. Through
the other, we see what the sperm whale appears to be – the next moment its tail disappears under
the water. Does the vacillation between the two worlds somehow help us understand what it is
like to be a whale? Unlikely. What it is like to be a human then? Maybe, to some extent, if we
are able to follow Melville who has himself broken the human routine of looking through joint
sashes.
If we follow Melville’s travels on the map of the world, we will notice that breaking the
routine must have been his intention from the beginning of his work on Moby-Dick. As a sailor,
Melville journeyed south, around South America, then north and west to the sperm whale
grounds in the North Pacific. The Pequod, in turn, embarked on a longer voyage: south then east,
through the Atlantic, south of Africa, through the Indian Ocean to the North Pacific. The final
destination of Melville’s real journey approximates the coordinates of the Pequod’s shipwreck.
Melville made his trip around the world – one part of it westwards, in his actual experience, the
other part, eastwards, in his imagination.16 He was virtually looking through the two opposite
sashes of personal experience and imagination. The writer’s “comprehensive, combining and
subtle” brain has unified the two perspectives into one picture in the novel.
Fascinating as they are, the structure of Moby-Dick and Melville’s pursuit of the routes of
experience and imagination seem to be only the surface of a much more complex phenomenon.
The vascilating point of view of the narrative from one character to another, along with the
puzzles around the actual roles of certain characters, generate disorientation on a much more
subtle level of reception. The first surprise happens after Ahab’s appearance on deck in Chapter
28, “Ahab.” It gives us Ishmael’s subjective description of a silent Ahab: “a man cut away from
the stake,” “made of solid bronze,” unnecessary as another mast, with a look on his face, “which,
in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.”17 In the following Chapter 29,
“Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb,” Ishmael turns into an all-knowing narrator. He describes events
that he could not have witnessed: what Ahab is muttering to himself, the quarrel between Stubb
and Ahab, and Stubb’s soliloquy.
The vacillation of the narrative’s point of view represents and underscores an important
side to the human quest for knowledge, beyond the question of whether we can empathically
know what it is like to be a whale. Can we know what it is to be the Other, speak from the
15 Ibid., 296.
16 As an author in search for a publisher, Melville also traveled east, to England. As a tourist, five years after the
publication of Moby-Dick he visited Malta, Salonica, Mount Athos, Constantinople, Alexandria, Jaffa, Jerusalem,
the Dead Sea, Beirut, Athens, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Pisa, Florence, Venice, Milan, Strasbourg, Heidelberg,
Cologne, Amsterdam and other cities. See Thomas Farel Haffernan, “Melville the Traveler,” A Companion to
Melville Studies. Ed. by John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
17 Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 108.
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Other’s point of view? Can Ishmael comprehend what it is to be Queequeg or Ahab or Stub?
This theme is introduced powerfully with the quick friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg.
However, it begins with Ishmael’s optimistic openness to the Other in the shore part of the novel
and develops into a contemplative, skeptical withdrawal in the sea part of the narrative. Exotic
Queequeg suddenly turns out to be less of a riddle than Ahab. Captain Ahab’s peculiar charisma
seems particularly intriguing to Ishmael because of its ethical dimensions. Ishmael immerses
himself into Ahab’s mystery. In addition, Pequod is like a floating island, providing a kind of
isolation indispensable for metaphysical quests. Ishmael explores the surface of Ahab’s riddle
and describes it. Then he tries to penetrate deeper, to assume Ahab’s point of view, to become
Ahab in order to understand his obsession. Readers sometimes complain that Ishmael loses the
lead of his story after the first part of Moby-Dick, or the “head” of the whale. I would suggest
that this change is purposeful – it supports the exploration of a slightly narrower version of the
big question about knowledge: How far can we go in knowing the Other? Melville seems to be
skeptical. We believe we can imagine what the Other thinks or feels because we detect certain
similarities between our experiences. Ahab’s obsession, however, is not easy to identify with.
There is something sublime in Ahab’s image: the kind of hideous, memorable greatness that
makes him comparable to the White Whale, with whom we cannot identify either. Significantly,
although everyone on the Pequod is involved in the chase of Moby Dick, only Ahab is genuinely
occupied with the question what it is to be Moby Dick.
On the surface, Ahab’s obsession may seem simple. He treats the White Whale as a
personal enemy and pursues revenge out of sheer pride – an eye for an eye: “I’ll chase him round
Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s
flames before I give up! And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that White Whale
on both sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.”18 Such is the spirit of Ahab’s
first speech to the crew in Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck.” The sailors are excited; only the
prudent Starbuck characterizes Ahab’s ambition to defeat the “dumb brute” as madness and
blasphemy.19 Ishmael, in Chapter 41, titled “Moby Dick,” reflects on Ahab’s monomania and the
reasons it became contagious for the Pequod’s crew. Gradually, in the second third of the novel,
as the narrative point of view begins vacillating and Ahab’s character acquires depth, we see that
there is more than madness to this weird chase. The feeling of inevitability, of doom, of knowing
the right thing and doing the wrong one, of total confusion as to who is the evil one, Moby Dick
or Ahab, do not support an unequivocal reading of the novel. Ahab, carefully observed through
Ishmael’s eyes, does not become truer; we do not come to know him better. But Ahab is
becoming more and more complex with the growing complexity of the book. We read the
cetology chapters – as supposed inserts by Melville-Ishmael – but Ahab says things that seem to
be related to those chapters in an entirely organic way, as if he, too, has read them. Thus,
although we continue to see the world of Melville’s novel as if with two eyes struggling to focus
simultaneously on two different objects, in some inexplicable way, the images of Ahab and
Ishmael begin to affect each other.
Of course, there is an explanation of this merger and there is nothing supernatural to it.
Moby-Dick is the record of its own becoming a whale of a novel. The different perspectives of
the author’s two sashes have merged in the “careful disorderliness” of his mind. But Melville has
chosen to leave the two perspectives only half-merged, with a whale-like blind spot in-between.
18 Ibid., 139.
19 Ibid.
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Harrison Hayford, in a brilliant essay devoted to Melville’s “non-economical” approach to
writing, entitled “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of Moby-Dick,”20 analyzes a
series of duplicate characters and events in the novel. Hayford reads these “unnecessary
duplicates” as birth traces of Melville’s creative process: the author changed his intentions about
the novel as a whole as well as about some of its main characters several times, but did not
bother to go back and rewrite what he had written. Instead, he tried to reconcile old and new
material in the way a creature with double vision would. The duplication begins with the title:
Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. In a way uncannily similar to the Book of Genesis, the novel has two
beginnings, in Chapter 1 and in Chapter 2. Ishmael visits two whaling ports, New Bedford and
Nantucket; he goes to two inns; hesitant to share a bed with the unknown savage, he goes to bed
twice – on the cold narrow bench, and in Queequeg’s room; he meets two future comrades,
Bulkington and Queequeg; he eats two chowders; and he encounters the two captains of the
Pequod, Peleg and Bildad, both of whom remain on land. Hayford elaborates on these noneconomical
duplications in the structure of the novel and, with the help of the scarce evidence we
have from Melville’s letters, arrives at a hypothesis about the genesis of Moby-Dick. He observes
that the novel is a result of multiple reassignment of characters’ roles.
Initially, this was supposed to be a story about a whaling adventure, told by Ishmael.
Bulkington, Ishmael’s comrade and a romantic truth-seeker, was probably conceived as the hero
of the novel – a harpooner, who in the end kills the legendary White Whale. Captain Peleg was
intended to be the sailing captain of the Pequod. But while working on the novel and reading
Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and various sources about whaling, Melville decided to develop the
potential of Bulkington’s character in a radical way. In order to do this, he had to get rid of the
original Bulkington, so he foretold his death very early in the story and memorialized him in the
lyrical Chapter 23. Exotic Queequeg became the comrade; Ishmael expropriated the truthseeking
line in the plot, which was meant for Bulkington; Ahab assumed the dubiously heroic
role of Moby Dick’s pursuer. Hayford speculates that some of Ahab’s truth-seeking speeches
that surprise the reader with their metaphysical depth were originally written for Bulkington.
Melville has given these speeches to Ahab in the way he gave him the artificial leg (which
Hayford supposes was originally intended to be Peleg’s, as his name might suggest).
To be sure, this theory of the genesis of Moby-Dick, though supported with serious
evidence from the text, remains just a hypothesis. However, its general supposition, that the later
stages of Melville’s novel incorporated the earlier ones with minimal adjustment, seems
convincing. While writing Moby-Dick, Melville must have discovered something about his own
creative process and about artistic creativity in general – something that would not yield to
analysis but can be represented poetically. We do not know at which stage of the composing of
the novel Melville wrote Chapter 32, entitled “Cetology.” It offers a parody of a scientific
classification of the whale species. Melville calls it “a draught of a systematization of
cetology.”21 The whales are classified as if they were chapters in books with different formats:
folio, octavo, and duodecimo. Predictably, the sperm whale is Chapter 1 and is in the first, Folio
class. This mock classification, abounding in random facts, opinions, and comments, is usually
neglected by readers and critics. Paradoxically, despite its title, the “Cetology” chapter seems
irrelevant even to the cetology line in the narrative. However, if we read Moby-Dick as a work of
metafiction, this strange chapter suddenly falls into place. The narrator introduces his taxonomy
20 Ibid., 674-696.
21 Ibid., 116.
9
by discussing the utter confusion and helplessness among the students of the whale species and
concludes: “the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not completely in any literature. Far
above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.”22 These lacunae in science and literature
lead the narrator to equate whale species with books or, rather, with book formats. The hybrid, of
course, not only does not solve the mystery of whales but it also points directly to the mystery of
books. Neither whales nor books are what they appear to be. The folio format does not tell us
anything about the contents of the book. It could be Shakespeare’s First Folio, or something else
– an anatomy book, for instance.
Perhaps this analogy between whales and books – elaborated with obvious gusto by
Melville – is inserted close to the beginning of the novel to introduce the theme of the mystery of
literary creativity. Not only can we not know what it is to be a whale, but we cannot know what
it is to be making a book about a whale, a book that resembles a whale – any book, for that
matter. The author-maker is not in full control of this process either. He is two people: the actual
person, with his human experience, and the authorial persona which is using that experience to
create a work of fiction. Melville the actual person goes on a real voyage west, Melville the
authorial persona goes on an imaginary journey east – and the two meet where Pequod sinks. In
the novel, Ishmael the acting character and Ishmael the narrator seem to be a projection of the
authorial split. The split allows for two different perspectives, for two sashes. But it also leaves a
mysterious blank space between them – a space of chaos where chance and necessity meet to
give birth to something different from the views of the two separate windows. This third thing, to
Melville, is the novel itself. And to us it is our reception of the novel.
Truth-seeking, similarly, needs double vision, an interaction. Our quest for certitude is a
process of constant vacillation – we doubt, we hesitate. Thus, the narrative must involve more
than one point of view, needing opposite perspectives. The so called “Extracts (Supplied by a
Sub-Sub-Librarian)” in the beginning of Moby-Dick form a heteroglossia that includes the Bible,
Plutarch, Pliny, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Herbert, Alexander Pope,
Thomas Jefferson, and about two dozen fairly imprecise references containing the word “whale.”
The randomness of these references resembles the writer’s primordial creative chaos from which
he aspires to make his own “largest animal,” his whale of a novel. None of these quotations is a
key to Moby-Dick. The key is somewhere between them, somewhere between Ishmael and Ahab
or between Ahab and the White Whale. This betweenness is impossible to pin down, to express,
to explain. But it does exists Moby-Dick points not only to the blind spot in the sperm whale’s
vision, but to the epistemological “profound darkness and nothingness” that divide a man from a
whale, one man from another, one thing from another. This nothingness, however, is fertile – a
realm of non-rational knowledge and creativity as well as of “inhuman solitude.”23 Like the
mystical “whiteness” of Moby Dick, this realm is paradoxically both empty and full of meaning.
It is appealing and appalling at the same time. It is ineffable, and yet Melville has expressed its
ineffability through his poetic vision.
4. Tail
The last part of this lecture, the tail, should be – like the ending of the tale of Moby-Dick and like
the tail of a true whale – the dynamic part of our gathering. The floor is yours.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 164.
10
Q: I have a question about the biblical references in Moby-Dick. While reading the novel,
I hear the diction of biblical language and I see biblical imagery. The main characters’ names are
biblical, too. The biblical influences seem obvious. At the same time, when I try to interpret the
biblical symbolism in Moby-Dick – for example, to figure out the meaning of the references to
Jonah’s or Ahab’s stories in the Bible – I am at a loss. Melville’s use of the Bible is not
straightforward, I conclude, especially in comparison with Emerson’s or Hawthorne’s. But I
can’t go any further than that. What am I missing?
A: Melville’s use of the Bible has been studied thoroughly.24 His pencil marks in the
family Bible and in his copy of the New Testament and Psalms have been meticulously counted
and discussed. Surprisingly, however, there are 77 marks in the Psalms and 52 in Matthew, but
Jonah has just one line marked and I Kings, which contains Ahab’s story, does not have any
marks.25 So, what are we missing?
We might be missing something that is simply not there: Moby-Dick’s interpretation of
the Bible. In Chapter 45, “The Affidavit,” where the narrator establishes his reliability as an
experienced whaleman as well as the plausibility of Moby Dick, based on facts about other
malicious whales, he warns the landsmen that reading his story of the White Whale as an
allegory would be “detestable,” “hideous and intolerable.”26 This warning certainly has a pinch
of irony in it, but the novel’s resistance to straight allegorical readings seems to prove that
Melville meant what he said. His intention was not to expound or illuminate the Bible. Rather, he
used the Bible spontaneously, in more or less the same way in which he used Shakespeare or
Milton. He did not feel the constraints of an interpreter; he felt the freedom of a writer whose
belief is that “it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”27
Let us consider the references to Jonah’s story. It is first introduced – and altered –
through Father Mapple’s sermon. Jonah is a prophet and a believer in Jehovah’s soft heart. He
embarks for Tarshish and not for Nineveh, where he was supposed to announce the destruction
of the city, out of compassion for Nineveh’s population and hoping that in the end God would
spare the Ninevites. Jonah of Father Mapple’s sermon, on the other hand, is afraid to “preach the
Truth in the face of Falsehood.”28 He cannot bear to be an outcast – that is why he is trying to
escape his duty. Ironically, however, this attempt to flee turns him into a worse outcast. His
shipmates believe that his presence causes God’s anger and drop him into the sea – luckily,
straight into the jaws of a big fish, which Father Mapple assumes to be a whale. In the whale’s
belly, Jonah accepts the punishment as just and repents. This saves him. The point of Father
Mapple’s sermon is that in order to obey God we have to disobey ourselves and this is hard;
24 Among the most informative are the following works: Natalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (Durham: North
Carolina: Duke University Press, 1949); Daniel G. Hoffman, “Moby-Dick: Jonah’s Whale or Job’s,” The Sewanee
Review, Spring 1961, vol. LXIX, no. 2, 203-224; Martin Leonard Pops, The Melville Archetype (Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1970); T. Walter Herbert, Jr., Moby-Dick and Calvinism (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1977); Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman
Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); Richard H. Broadhead (ed.), New Essays on Moby-Dick (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); Rowland A. Sherril, “Melville and Religion,” A Companion to Melville Studies,
ed. by John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 481-514; Elisa New, “Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves!
Hellenism and Hebraism in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” Poetics Today 19:2 (Summer 1998), 281-303.
25 Natalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible, 9-10.
26 Ibid., 172.
27 “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Ibid., 526-7.
28 Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 53.
11
hence we all sin and we all must repent. 29 This is not an allegorical interpretation. Its spirit is
Calvinist – no escape from Providence. It is also psychological – an example of the difficulties
everyone encounters in obeying God, or doing the right thing.
If we ask whether in Moby-Dick there is a Jonah, we will be seeking an allegorical
correspondence between the novel and the Bible. We would not be able to give a definitive
answer to this question. For both Ahab and Ishmael resemble Jonah. (Pip who falls in the water,
but is rescued, is another possible Jonah.) Ahab resembles Jonah through negation. Jonah spends
three days in the belly of the great fish, composing a hymn of thanksgiving to God, after which
he is safely delivered to dry land. Unrepentant Ahab, in turn, will remain forever united with the
White Whale, his ambiguous mission paradoxically unfulfilled and fulfilled.
Ishmael’s relation to Jonah is more complex. He is escaping the duties and routine of the
land life; he is sailing to drive off “the spleen.”30 While hunting for whales and pursuing Moby
Dick with the Pequod’s crew, Ishmael is not yet aware that he, like Jonah, has a mission. Only
after the Pequod is crushed and he alone survives – not in a whale’s belly, but in the coffin of his
pagan friend Queequeg – does Ishmael become a prophetic storyteller. He preaches to the
landsmen “the Truth in the Face of Falsehood.” And this “Truth” seems to be that the “Truth”
will remain unknowable, like the brow of the White Whale. Ishmael’s story resembles Jonah’s in
yet another way. Jonah’s legend has been interpreted as an account of an initiation ceremony as
well.31 The candidate for divine knowledge first tries to withdraw, then undergoes a mock-death,
and at the end emerges reborn into the priesthood. In the beginning, Ishmael, although he is
already interested in the “ungraspable phantom of life” wants to be just “a simple sailor.” At the
end of the novel, he emerges from his mock-death as a storyteller.
Moby-Dick points to an analogy between Ahab and Jonah and between Ishmael and
Jonah, rather than to an allegory. Analogy is a kind of “double vision” – one thing is like
another, but they remain unconnected, separated by a blank. Allegory, on the other hand, fills in
the blank in the way a metaphor does, by merging the two elements. Moby-Dick keeps Jonah and
Ishmael similar but separate, which excludes an allegorical relationship between them. I believe
that we would be more faithful readers of Moby-Dick, if we accept the novel’s “double vision”
and do not try to fill in the blank between the Bible and the novel.
Q: Does this apply to Ahab and his namesake of I Kings? Melville’s Ahab is a captain –
the king of his ship, so to say. He is a worshiper of a false god, Fire; Ahab the King of Israel,
established a worship of Baal…
A: Melville’s Ahab is more an Ahab than a Jonah, I agree. However, the biblical Ahab is
an able politician with a broad vision of the future of Israel and not a monomaniac; he promotes
the worship of Baal – in addition to Jehovah – under the influence of his wife, Jezebel; he
repents and is saved by God, though with a warning: “I will not bring the evil in his days: but in
his son’s days will I bring the evil upon his house” (I Kings 21: 29). None of these applies to
Melville’s Ahab. Unless we think of him as a symbolic, modern successor of the biblical Ahab
29 Chapter 83, “Jonah Historically Regarded,” by questioning the plausibility of the legend, seems to question the
validity of Father Mapple’s point as well.
30 Ibid., 18.
31 William Simpson, The Jonah Legend (London, 1899), referred to by Daniel G. Hoffman in “Jonah’s Whale or
Jobs,” The Sewanee Review. Ibid.
12
and explain his fate as a punishment for his great ancestor’s sins. This will fit the idea of
predestination, but won’t necessarily enrich our reception of the novel.
Q: Speaking of predestination, wouldn’t you agree that Moby-Dick can be read – and is
meant to be read – as an account of fulfilled omens and prophecies, such as the tablets in the
Whalemen’s Chapel, the name of Peter Coffin, Elijah’s prophecy or Fedallah’s prophecy? Do
you see the prophecies in Moby-Dick as a biblical influence? Are they a glimpse into the
unknowable in a way similar to the Old Testament tradition, in which the prophets are God’s
messengers?
A: I think that in the plot of Moby-Dick the omens and prophesies have a foreshadowing
function. In this respect, Melville’s novel does not differ from other works of fiction that use
foreshadowing to shape the reader’s expectations on subliminal level and to support the
plausibility of the events. In Chapter 19, “The Prophet,” a “beggar-like stranger,” who calls
himself Elijah, approaches Ishmael and Queequeg to say several elusive sentences about Captain
Ahab and the Pequod’s forthcoming voyage. This is not a direct warning, yet Ishmael as well as
the reader, alerted by the biblical associations of the stranger’s name, cannot help suspecting
some kind of transgression on the Captain’s part. However, I would not call this a glimpse into
the unknowable. Rather, Elijah delineates and confirms the unknowable by his obscure speech:
“Well, well, what’s signed, is signed: and what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t
be, after all.”32 On the other hand, the prophecy of Fedallah the Parsee, perceived by the crew as
a “devil in disguise,” sometimes a lord to Ahab, at other times his slave,33 is very particular – so
particular and unlikely that it makes Ahab feel immortal. According to that prophecy, Ahab will
die only if he sees two hearses on the ocean, one not made by man's hand, the other made of
American-grown wood; only if Fedallah is already dead; and only by hemp.34 Fedallah’s
foretelling has been compared with the witches’ misleading prophecy that makes Shakespeare’s
Macbeth feel safe – “none of woman born shall harm him” and he will live until the Great
Birnam Wood comes against him (4.1). Such fatalistic prophecies are dramatically powerful, but
they are also interesting as metafictional revelations. They give us a glimpse into the mystical
way in which the author limits his own creative freedom – by inventing “necessary” parameters
that determine the logic of the work.
Q: Then, from the beginning of the novel, it is clear that Ishmael, the narrator, will
survive. But why should he be the only survivor? Couldn’t Queequeg’s coffin save two
shipmates, say Starbuck and Ishmael. Or, if saving Starbuck would make the ending too
moralistic, why not Ishmael and Pip?
A: Well, the epigraph to the “Epilogue” reads, “And only I am escaped alone to tell
thee”35 – a formula with which in the Bible each of the four messengers concludes the terrible
news he is bringing to Job (Job, 1:14-19). This epigraph is a good example of Melville’s way of
turning biblical content into form.36 Pequod’s misfortune is not exactly comparable to Job’s.
Unless, again, we see Ahab as an anti-Job in the same sense in which we considered him to be an
32 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 88.
33 Ibid., 259, 401.
34 Ibid., 377.
35 Ibid., 427.
36 The phrase is borrowed from Natalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible, 19.
13
anti-Jonah. However, Melville’s choice of this particular formula is suitable on a formal level:
the catastrophe will make for a stirring story, which needs a storyteller. Thus, at least one person
has to be spared. I would go farther and say that, for a good story, only one person should be
spared. A witness would jeopardize the storytelling, in which – if it is to be good – facts and
imagination must fuse. This is an old model. Homer’s Odysseus loses his companions and alone
survives to tell his story (or several different stories). Dante, though accompanied by guides
during his mystical journey, embarks on it alone and returns alone to tell his story about afterlife.
The narrative of Moby-Dick, however, though formally carried by the only survivor of the
events, is a result of the collaboration between at least two Ishmaels – one goes through all the
experiences of his journey, the other turns those experiences into a story. The former brings in
the content, the latter brings in the form. Chapter 54, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” allows the reader
to meet Ishmael the storyteller and offers a peep into his storytelling secrets – secrets of a weaver
who masterfully interweaves the publicly told with the dreamed and imagined.37 The Ishmael of
experience is present in a more pure form from the beginning of the novel until Chapter 41, titled
“Moby Dick,” where a sudden distance between him and the events on the Pequod is introduced:
“I, Ishmael, was one of the crew.” Thus, the double vision of the narrative is assured by the only
survivor’s authorial split.
Q: It appears that Melville’s double vision permeates almost all thematic and structural
levels of Moby-Dick. However, there seems to be at least one level, on which Melville’s “two
sashes” have the same perspective, with no mysterious blank in between. This is a masculine
book par excellence: it involves only men and it is about an obsessive hunt – the kind of hunt
that a woman would qualify as sheer madness. Women remain on shore; they have no power to
influence their men from afar, to bring them to their senses. Could you comment on this?
A: I think you are right. The possibility of a two-gender vision is perhaps the only one
unrealized in Moby-Dick. But perhaps this is the whole point. What is happening in Moby-Dick
is possible only in an exclusively male environment. D. H. Lawrence has said that Melville’s sea
voyages are attempts to escape “from home and mother.” I would suggest that they are attempts
to escape the overwhelming female presence of his demanding mother and four sisters. Camille
Paglia interprets Moby-Dick as Melville’s sexual protest “against the paralyzing bliss of female
stasis.”38 Therefore the White Whale, pursued by the males as an enemy, must posses female
features. However, if we shift to a higher level of abstraction and think of the masculine and the
feminine as they were commonly labeled in the 19th century, as active and passive, the picture
would turn out to be more complex.
The whales are envisaged as passive victims. Both female and male whales are expected
to try to escape, but not to attack. Stories of “malicious” whales are rare and have the air of
legends. This makes Moby Dick even more exceptional. Judging from its size, the White Whale
is positively a male exemplar. Nevertheless, as a representative of its species, it is expected to be
symbolically feminine in its passivity. Yet it is not; it is active in a masculine way. This makes it
37 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 200. A thoughtful analysis of this chapter can be found
in Edgar A. Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1968).
38 Camille Paglia, “Moby-Dick as sexual protest,” Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Quoted from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker
and Hayford, 701.
14
a partner for Ahab and worth the chase in the eyes of the crew. It certainly is not just Ahab’s
charisma or the golden doubloon that enchants the crew. It is Moby Dick as an erotic challenge.
To slay Moby Dick would be the best proof of masculinity for this would mean that the
rebellious semi-feminine has been tamed. The way the novel ends, however, suggests a selfannihilation
of the masculine.
Q: In your lecture, you presented the metafictional as a crucial element in Moby-Dick.
The early critics of the novel seem to have disliked precisely this modernist feature of the
narrative. Yet Moby-Dick was not unsuccessful even when first published in 1851. Pierre or The
Ambiguities, however, published just a year later, was a fiasco and remains read mostly by
Melville scholars. I, personally, like Pierre because of it subversiveness, but I wonder what is it
about this novel that does not work for most readers. Could this be precisely the protagonist’s
reflections on writing, that is, the metafictional element?
A: Very likely. But I think that Pierre or The Ambiguities is underappreciated not
because of the metafictional element as such, but because of the nature of its “ambiguities.”
Moby-Dick has its own ambiguities, to be sure. It is difficult to imagine characters more
ambiguous than Ahab or the White Whale. The reader, however, follows Ishmael’s personal
struggle with that ambiguity and internalizes his split between “one of the crew” and the
surviving storyteller. Moby-Dick simulates a record of life as it is turning into literature. In
Pierre, Melville explores the opposite possibility: what it would be like to turn literature into life.
The protagonist is a young writer whose strange dreams come true. Engaged to be married to
Lucy, Pierre suddenly meets Isabel, who has already appeared in his dreams. She turns out to be
his half-sister and changes his life forever. The plot is labyrinthine and contrived and feels like
an exploration of different possibilities that might or might not lead to a future book. This in
itself could be exciting for the kind or reader who tends to identify not with the characters, but
with the mind of the writer. However, the detached, omniscient narrative point of view in Pierre
precludes this. The mind of the writer is too obscure for the reader to identify with it. The
narrator declares that “this history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls. Nimble
center, circumference elastic you must have,”39 but the reader is hesitant to follow, for neither is
the “occasion” clear nor does the guide appear to be charismatic like Ishmael. Thus, Pierre or
The Ambiguities may be considered a failure by some, but it is a failure that teaches us a lot
about the limitations of metafiction.
Q: What happens to Melville’s metafiction when his books are turned into movies?
A: It seems to me that, in general, directors who make movies based on books with
metafictional elements tend to skip those elements. Cinematic metafiction differs from literary
metafiction because the medium is different: a movie about making a movie must differ from a
novel about writing a novel. One recent exception comes to mind: Robert Benton turned Philip
Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, into a movie, with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman in the
main roles. However, he kept Roth’s famous writer character, Zuckerman, in the movie, thus
emphasizing the literary metafictional element in the story. In a sense, the film – like the book –
is about the writing of the story of Coleman Silk. Not surprisingly, some film critics found
Zuckerman’s presence in the film unnecessary. And again, not surprisingly, Roth is said to have
liked the movie.
39 Herman Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 54.
15
To return to Melville, the film versions of Moby-Dick and Pierre or the Ambiguities have
almost entirely excluded the metafictional elements that seem to define these novels. However,
the result is very different in each case. Both film versions of Moby-Dick – that of 1930, directed
by Lloyd Bacon, with John Barrymore as Ahab, and that of 1956, directed by John Huston,
screenplay by the young Ray Bradbury, with Gregory Peck as Ahab – emphasize the adventure.
The 1930 version even is “enriched” by a love story. Without the metafictional element and the
ambiguities in the characters of Ahab, the White Whale, and Ishmael, the film versions of
Melville’s Moby-Dick are faint shadows of the literary original. By contrast, the 1999 film
version of Pierre – entitled Pola X, directed by Leos Carax, with Guillaume Depardieu as Pierre
– seems to be more successful than Melville’s novel precisely because it focuses on the
mysteriousness and dreamy quality of the complex plot while limiting the metafictional to the
minimum required by Pierre’s occupation as a writer.
Q: What, to you, is the funniest moment in Moby-Dick?
A: There are many funny moments in the novel – despite its seriousness. But let me
quote just the beginning of Chapter 12, “Biographical,” because it demonstrates the fun potential
of the metafictional: “Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far to the West and South.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.”40
[Based on a public lecture delivered at the Chicago Cultural Center in March 2005 and material
from Katia Mitova, ‘Erotic Uncertainty: Toward a Poetic Psychology of Literary Creativity’
(PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005).]
40 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. by Parker and Hayford, 59