What fascinates me about Moby Dick is the project of man going out there between the vast and infinite deserts of water beneath and sky above, embarking on a nut-shell such as the Pequod between continents, and trying to find something, to hunt something down and encounter it - the White whale, Moby Dick, or, as I interpret it, the Truth - and G-d himself - which might be a Jewish perspective. The encounter with the White Whale, to me, means an encounter with the Ultimate, with last questions, and with last answers.
I would like to start out with the presentation of a paragraph from chapter Nine ("The Sermon"), page 53/54. It is part of the conclusion of an emotional sermon on the old biblical tale of Jonah's encounter with a whale, which Father Mapple delivers to a congregation in New Bedford whose members have made their living by hunting the whale, and who have lost family in doing so:
"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon
you; both his hands press
upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may
be mine the lesson
that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore
to ye, and still more
to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And
now how gladly would I
come down from this mast-head and sit on the
hatches there where you
sit, and listen as you listen, while some one
of you reads me that
other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches
to me, as a pilot of
the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet,
or speaker of
true things and bidden by the Lord to sound those
unwelcome truths
in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled
at the hostility he
should raise, fled from his mission, and sought
to escape his duty and
his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere;
Tarshish he
never reached. As we have seen, God came upon
him in the whale, and
swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom,
and with swift slantings
tore him along 'into the midst of the seas,'
where the eddying
depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down,
and 'the weeds were
wrapped about his head,' and all the watery
world of woe bowled over
him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any
plummet- 'out of the
belly of hell' - when the whale
grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones,
even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting
prophet when he cried.
Then God spake unto the fish; and from the
shuddering cold and
blackness of the sea, the whale came
breeching up towards the warm and
pleasant sun, and all the delights of air
and earth; and 'vomited
out Jonah upon the dry land;'
when the word of the Lord came a
second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten- his
ears, like two
sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of
the ocean- Jonah did
the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates?
To preach the
Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was
it!"
A short interpretation leads to three conclusions about this text:
Altogether, the three issues discussed - the encounter with the whale as Truth, and the two metaphors of the whale and the sea - suggest that this book is about the search of soul for Truth. That is the central hypothesis, and the three arguments that are being made in respect to the encounter and the two metaphors shall be presented in the next few paragraphs.
The
encounter with the whale as Truth
The first hypothesis is that the quest of the Pequod is a quest
for Truth, a Truth that lies both in the encounter with the White Whale
as a 'moment of Truth', and in the pursuit of Moby Dick itself. To
support that argument, it will be presented how Captain Ahab establishes
a covenant with his crew and a religion of vengeance, and how Ishmael,
as 'one of the crew', adopts the ideas of his Captain and invests it with
own observations about the White Whale, thus justifying the hunt for Moby
Dick. It will be argued that Moby Dick is elevated to be the counterpart
of the monomaniac Ahab, and is endowed with a status of the Ultimate,
the Ultimate necessarily being the last Truth.
If life is a voyage, and experience in life is to be gained from traveling and "seeing the world" (as Ishmael suggests when applying aboard the Pequod), then Captain Ahab and his crew have a definite goal in life: to find the White Whale, and destroy him. It is the mission of the Pequod to travel thousands of miles around the globe in search for this ultimate encounter - ultimate in the sense that it is the goal Ahab has set, and ultimate also in the sense that the encounter sinks the Pequod and kills all men but Ishmael. Single-minded, determined, and ruled only by the desire to hunt down Moby Dick, the Pequod's course is determined by the monomaniac Ahab, who seeks revenge with Moby Dick, and a re-encounter with him. Ahab is possessed with this idea, and it seems that ever since Moby Dick "devoured, chewed up, crunched" (p. 80) Ahab's leg, he also enslaved Ahab's will. Ahab obeys but one idea: to find and kill the White Whale. Mad as he is, "chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world" he is an "ungodly old man" with a crew "chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals - morally enfeebled also..." (p. 203)
In that sense, the men on the Pequod are, like Jonah, "God-fugitive(s)" (p. 51). The Pequod is - like the countries Jonah seeks to flee to, a ship "where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth" (p. 48). Is God about to lay hands upon them again, as Father Mapple suggests? As he points out in the part of the sermon quoted above: "God is everywhere... God came upon him in the whale". Whether God can be translated as 'fate', or is seen as the power bringing back and enforcing morality in the world, should not concern us. More important is the popular notion that God always represents the "Ultimate", and the "Last", the "Final" institution, the one who's word was the first, and who's word will be the last, and hence, last Truth. We take this popular notion as existent and will have a look at Ahab's and Ishmaels voluntary anticipation of the ultimate encounter with the White Whale, in contrast to Jonah's involuntarily encounter with a whale. It will be shown how the White Whale and the encounter with him are constructed as two concepts of meaning, and how Ahab links these concepts in a religion of personal vengeance. In conclusion, it will be pointed out that the encounter with the White Whale was an encounter with Truth for both Ahab/Ishmael and Jonah.
The
Structural Presentation of Reflections on Whales in Moby Dick
The second supporting hypthesis is that the use of the
metaphor of the "whale" and the presentation of it throughout the book
fit the meaning of Truth attributed to the White Whale. One
can have the impression that the description of the whales never
comes to an end. Melville gives several different pespectives on the "Leviathan":
Mythical, religious, historical, philosophical and scientific perspectives.
He recounts the attempts being made by artists to picture the whale, cites
zoological evidence and recalls the tales other whaling-men tell of the
whale. Basically, Melville traces all kinds of ways
man has ever taken over the course of history to arrive at an understanding
just what that is - the Whale, or, supporting our argument here, the last
Truth of which the White Whale is a symbol in the book.
Until the final description of the actual Moby Dick (p. 596), the
reader has become an expert on Whales. Yet, the encounter is still an adventure.
All that has been said does not count any longer in the face of Moby Dick.
All previous attempts to secure Moby Dick within
the boundaries of words were in vain -
Moby Dick is too mighty to be encountered with aggressivness. She leaves
the crew dead, except for Ishmael, who is rescued
to tell the story of Moby Dick, and thus "preach the Truth to the face
of falsehood", as Jonah did.
The
Sea of Existence as Stage of the Ultimate Encounter
The sea is the place where the hunt for truth of the Pequod takes place.
If the White Whale is but a metaphor, what corresponding metaphor is the
'sea', and inhowfar can the interpretation of this metaphor serve the interpretation
of Moby Dick as a book about souls searching for Truth?
It is argued that the "sea" really means existence. Special
consideration is given to the "fowls and fish" of the sea, the
notion of the 'soul' that often occurs together with reflections on
the sea, and to the Island of Tahiti in the soul. It will be discussed
where Truth is to be found, what happens during the search for
Truth, and inhowfar the mad Pequod is man's soul on a serach through
the tides of our existence.