Thoughts on Moby-Dick. Part I.
- By Lech Harris
(From a Sub-Sub-Intern)
At the age of 27, as a soon-to-be Master of the Fine Arts, generally priding himself on the breadth of his reading, I decided at last that it could be put off no longer: it was time to read Moby-Dick. In this blog series, I'll be attempting to organize my thoughts, ideas, and associations in ongoing installments, as I encounter the novel as a first-time reader.
One of the immediate things that strikes you on a first reading of Moby-Dick is the oddly comical tone of its early scenes. This was a surprise for me, though I have to admit that I’ve always found Bartleby and Benito Cereno extremely funny. As Elaine Barry has pointed out, Melville was much noted for his comic sensibility in his own day: he was featured in an 1890 Harper’s article titled “American Literary Comedians,” and was referred to approvingly by Stevenson as “a howling cheese” (with laurels like that, it’s a wonder he never got any respect).
The first major scene in Moby-Dick, of course, is the prolonged, farcical sequence in which Ishmael must share a bed in an inn with an unidentified man; only to discover that his intended bedfellow is the giant, tattooed, idol-worshipping cannibal, Queequeg. Aside from its broader elements of farce, this scene is funny in much the same way as Benito and Bartleby: we are treated to all the vacillations, reversals, and rationalizations of a bewildered but still self-sure mind, attempting to assert control over a situation that it is utterly unable to grasp. Like Benito’s Captain Delano, and the narrator of Bartleby, Ishmael repeatedly works himself up towards a determined resolution, only to immediately undercut it with some new rationale; the comic pleasure here is that of watching a mind continually contradict itself, while staying fully certain at all times of its own rationality. Such sequences, in Melville, are always a parody of rationality itself; it is perhaps in this way that we ought to understand Borges’ assertion that Melville was the literary forebear of Kafka.
The bedroom scene with Queequeg has been oft-remarked for its broad comedy; another early set piece, less appreciated for its comic value, is the sermon in Father Mapple’s church. Throughout, the father refers to his parishioners as his “shipmates,” and his chapel is appointed everywhere with the icons and implements of whaling; his pulpit is fashioned to resemble a ship’s prow, and he ascends it manfully via a rope ladder. Unsurprisingly, the scriptural passage that he selects for his sermon is the story of Jonah and the whale. I can’t help but feel that there’s something funny in all this. The church is normal and generalized in every respect, with the sole exception of its obsession with whaling; this tension between the universal and the particular (where the particular feels out-of-place or arbitrary) is, after all, one of the most reliable tropes in comedy. There is an exemplary Monty Python sketch in which various Romantic poets (Shelley is played memorably by Terry Gilliam) take turns reading verses at a literary reception; all of their poems circle back obsessively to the subject of ants. Similarly, Flann O’Brien, in his immortally hilarious The Third Policeman, gets inordinate comic mileage from the simple premise that a local police station is organized wholly around an irrational preoccupation with bicycles.
In the case of Mapple’s chapel, of course—unlike the two examples I’ve given—the obsession with whales is clearly motivated and not arbitrary (the entire congregation are whalers); therefore, the comedy is admittedly less obvious. Still, the more you think about the scene, the stranger and funnier it gets. It seems completely evident that in such a church, there is never a sermon given which does not centrally involve whales; however, it is equally clear that the Jonah tale is the only story of the Bible that concerns a whale in any relevant way. One is thus forced to arrive at one of two equally comical conclusions: either the father delivers the exact same sermon every week (in which case the sermon that Ishmael attends is but one iteration in an infinite identical series), or Mapple is forced on a weekly basis to contrive a different spin on the same biblical episode, merely to satisfy his unreasonably specific theme.
One finds odd leaps between the particular and the universal everywhere in the text of Moby-Dick. There is a certain manic quality in the language, given excessively to soaring rhetorical flights, and lengthy, theatrical digressions that can take off at any time without warning. Often this flightiness serves to transport us from a description of a very particular person or thing, to a meditation on abstract and universal principles. A representative case is the chapter introducing Starbuck, in which an enumeration of the first mate’s unique virtues and attributes leads quickly to an exposition on the “valor in the soul” of all men. Thus, what begins as a fairly perfunctory character sketch ends in a kind of wild-eyed speechifying:
“But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”
Such a narrative style seems always to be bordering on hysteria. The baroque excess of the language itself makes possible a certain excess of thought, a perpetual vaulting from the mundane to the absolute, from pipe-chewing whalers to the All-Being. This peculiar quality is shared by Thoreau, who himself often indulged in a self-consciously baroque style. In Walden, a simple observation about the railroad is never far from a remark about the fated tracks of men’s lives, nor a description of the bells of Concord from the “vibration of the universal lyre.” (One thinks also, of course, of Whitman.)
I’m tempted to say that this perpetual dash up the chain of being is the essential Transcendentalist move, which it doubtless is, but it also points up the extent to which both Melville and Thoreau were influenced stylistically by certain 17th-century thinkers; particularly Sir Thomas Browne. In his masterpiece, Religio Medici, Browne produces brilliant and arresting ruminations on problems of divinity by applying a kind of allegorical logic to specific natural phenomena, and reasoning his way up from the material plane to the absolute; Browne’s richly Latinate and baroque prose style was to be greatly influential for the American Romantics. We might also invoke Browne’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, whose Baconian method of inductive reasoning (i.e., the scientific method) proceeds from particular observations about the observable world to the discovery of universal principles.
Borges, another devotee of Browne (who also exhibits, it must be added, a certain tendency to leap from the earthly to the infinite), opined that “Moby-Dick is written in a Romantic dialect of English, a vehement dialect that alternates or conjugates the techniques of Shakespeare, Thomas de Quincey, Browne, and Carlyle.” Borges offers the following summary of the novel’s arc:
“…at the beginning, the reader might consider the subject to be the miserable life of whale harpooners; then, that the subject is the madness of Captain Ahab, bent on pursuing and destroying the white whale; finally, that the whale and Ahab and the pursuit which exhausts the oceans of the planet are symbols and mirrors of the universe.”
By this understanding, the entire novel is a grand enactment of the move from the particular to the absolute. The notion of the microcosm, one of Browne’s favorite tropes, stems from the assumption that there are necessary sympathies between the universal whole and its specific parts; what Melville reveals is that when this necessity is severed by the irrational fixities of obsession, we find ourselves in the realm of horror; and, perhaps, of comedy.
