Thoughts on Moby Dick: Part II
- By Lech Harris
The first installment of this blog series was published on February 20.
About a third of the way through the novel, after long anticipation, the reader at last finds herself face to face with Captain Ahab—and via Ahab, introduced indirectly to that other looming presence that awaits us somewhere on the horizon, the Whale itself. At the same moment that this encounter occurs, two things happen simultaneously on the level of the narrative: first, the tone of the novel pivots abruptly, and second, Ishmael loses his solidity as a character.
Prior to our first glimpse of Ahab, the generic tone of the novel could best be described as a kind of buddy comedy. The principals, of course, are Ishmael and Queequeg, their odd-couple friendship, and the various eccentric misadventures that their strange pairing leads them into. The chapters roll by like a jolly montage of cultural misunderstanding: Queequeg, at breakfast, stabs a steak with his spear; Ishmael, frantic, breaks down the door of their room, only to find placid Queequeg meditating with an idol on his head, entranced in pagan reveries; Ishmael lectures Queequeg on idolatry, while the two share a smoke out of a grotesque tomahawk; Queequeg serenely hurls an insolent sailor across the deck, as Ishmael wrings his hands. The mood is affable, light and affectionate—even when the action is dramatic, it is the kind of drama that serves only to stoke the fires of comic mischance.
To be sure, there are some ominous notes scattered throughout here, that forecast something darker ahead: as when Ishmael and Queequeg arrive at a forbidding inn on Nantucket, where an old mast and crossbeam has been planted before the door, in the grim likeness of a gallows. But these portents are not at odds with the comic mood; on the contrary, they participate fully in the general tone of wry, burlesque misfortune. It’s like an old cartoon, where you know that the fellow whose car has just broken down will end up at a garishly macabre inn assembled out of horror clichés—but you also know, with equal certainty, that these trappings portend only a series of punch-lines and bugged-out pratfalls. The logic of farce is that, given any circumstances, the worst thing possible always happens; the rider, of course, is that there are never any serious consequences. This is the logic that would seem to dictate the first act of Moby-Dick. Thus it is, that when our unlikely duo sign on to join the crew of the Pequod, and soon after begin to hear troubling rumors about the ship’s shadowy captain, these narrative omens still strike us as essentially of a piece with the reigning comedic tone: of course the whaling vessel that our heroes choose just happens to be the one ship that is run by a skulking maniac! It would be thus in any cartoon.
Ahab’s appearance, however, which is the culmination of this farce logic, also marks its end, and the sudden transition into a radically different register: Shakespearean High Tragedy. From his first soaring speech on the quarter-deck (a scene of truly immense dramatic power, and astonishing rhetorical poetry), it is clear that the Captain is built on an entirely different scale from anything that has come before. Ahab does not resemble a Shakespearean tragic character; he is a Shakespearean tragic character, imported wholesale from some lost play, with every tonal and linguistic detail intact. As a black-frocked Quaker, Ahab habitually employs the Elizabethan “thou” and “thee”; further, as many have pointed out, his dialogue often scans in iambic pentameter (as in his first spoken line of the novel, “It feels like going down into one’s tomb”). His speeches draw intensity from a great variety of Shakespearean devices, such as the pairing of antitheses (“And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out”), neologisms, and compellingly strange adjective–noun combinations (“It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye”). Melville deploys all this, and more, to ravishing effect—and by the sheer intensity of the language, the stakes of the novel change.
John Bryant has commented on the tonal shift that occurs “from the Ishmaelean Tale A to Ahab’s very Shakespearean Tale B,” but what he does not acknowledge is our sense that this shift is impelled, in some strange way, by Ahab himself; from inside the text, as it were. Ahab’s Shakespearism is contagious. After their captain’s appearance, the other characters begin to behave oddly, delivering long, impassioned soliloquies—even soliloquizing while eavesdropping on each other’s soliloquies. In the uneasy whisperings of the crew, Shakespearean language proliferates—“D’ye mark him, Flask?,” “T’will soon be out,” “But, mum; he comes this way”—and once Ahab has revealed his grand plans of revenge (Chapter 36), the very text itself becomes infected: the chapters that follow begin to be dotted with italicized stage directions, stand-out monologues, and asides. By Chapter 40, the text has fully transformed into a dramatic script, with the speaker of each line marked in all capitals. Even Ishmael, in his narration, begins to parrot Shakespeare (“mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, and signifying nothing”).
All of this brings me in mind of Bartleby, and the way that scrivener’s infamous catchphrase becomes a kind of linguistic virus, leading the other clerks in the office, and even the narrator, to catch themselves constantly repeating what they would “prefer.” There is something parallel at work here: Ahab, like Bartleby, introduces by his character a certain linguistic peculiarity into the text, which then spreads virally to the other characters. Melville has an enduring interest in infectious forms of madness, which he chooses to enact on the level of language—thus, the spread of Shakespearism among the crew serves to dramatize their fall under Ahab’s spell.
Meanwhile, this new register of language marks out the shift that has occurred from a comic to a tragic space. In a kind of dialectical move, the development of the comic-misfortunate tone (Ishmael’s farcical Tale A) brings forth finally an element—Ahab—which is so excessive as to be in excess of comedy, which cannot be contained or figured within a comedic structure, and so compels the transformation of the structure itself. Ahab’s spectacular entrance exceeds the comic impulse that creates it. It is as if a dripping, bellowing Lear has suddenly burst onto the set of some light diversion, and begun insistently passing out new scripts to the bewildered actors.
(There is another sense, as well, in which this new register has changed the novel’s stakes: for the sudden elevation of the prose into American Shakespeare also heightens our sense of what the author has set out to prove. It is impossible to avoid the feeling, in these chapters, that Melville is going up toe-to-toe against Shakespeare; as surely as Milton went toe-to-toe with Homer and Virgil. In John Bryant’s interesting reading, Melville means not merely to equal Shakespeare, but to exorcise him in the name of American artistic independence; whatever the case, it is clear that the entirety of the novel is deeply Shakespeare-haunted.)
This brings us, at last, to the second shift that occurs on the level of narrative: Ishmael’s loss of substantiality as a character. This move is tied in inextricably with the shift in tone, both occurring simultaneously at the appearance of Ahab. Prior to this appearance, Ishmael’s presence is that of a tangible actor: it is a bodily presence, that we observe acting in scene, as well as a vocal presence, chatting amicably to the reader. With the move to the Shakespearean set, however, with its theatrical cues and stage directions, the comforting coherence of Ishmael’s presence dissolves, and the voice of the novel fragments. Whole chapters are given over to soliloquies and dialogues by other speakers, which not only do not involve Ishmael, but that Ishmael, as a character, could not plausibly observe (for example, Ahab’s musings when alone in his cabin). The buddy plot with Queequeg terminates abruptly, and Ishmael, as narrator, melts into the ropey jungle of the ship: a ghostly, disembodied, omniscient observer.
Much could be said of the fractured and multivocal subjectivity of the novel, which strikes one as so essentially modern; what I would like to do, instead, is to make a different connection, to an older variety of narrative that exhibits these same qualities, and is already implied by the metaphors above: that of the Gothic. Robert Miles, and other recent commentators, have emphasized the “disjunctive” nature of Gothic narratives, their concern—in Miles’ phrase—with “the representation of fragmented subjectivity.” In contemporary conceptions, the Gothic is a narrative mode defined by iterability, by excess, by the constant reprising and exceeding of its own structures. By the 19th century, the genre itself, as Julian Wolfreys argues, had “dematerialized into a somewhat unpredictable tropological play.” It is perhaps significant, then, that the potent appearance of Ahab is attended directly by the introduction of a figure that is troped entirely in Gothic trappings: Moby Dick. The White Whale is a “monster” that has “haunted” the seas, with “shrouded hue” and “sickle-shaped” jaw; its history is already a ghost story, made up of fragmentary eyewitness accounts and “supernatural surmisings”—speculations that the “apparition” may be ubiquitous, or unkillable. Could the spectrality of Moby Dick be aligned in some way with the Gothic excesses and transformations that occur on the narrative level? (Perhaps I might suggest a further alignment, by noting that the Gothic tradition is itself a Shakespeare-haunted form: for if we take Walpole’s Castle of Otranto for the foundational Gothic text—a book that borrows from Shakespeare in every imaginable way, including lifting the plot of Hamlet—then the Gothic genre was conceived from its very inception as a gross imitation of Shakespeare.)
In any case, what is certain is that Melville, like the Gothic, had an abiding fascination with the breakdown of human reason in the face of the inscrutable: and that Moby-Dick and Bartleby are his two greatest statements on that subject. “Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?” Ishmael asks the reader at the end of the novel’s second act. “There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them."
