Paul Wiles' Essays


Herman Melville's

MOBY DICK

by Paul Anthony Wiles

PART X

Home Moby Dick Part I
Moby Dick Part II Moby Dick Part III
Moby Dick Part IV Moby Dick Part V
Moby Dick Part VI Moby Dick Part VII
Moby Dick Part VIII Moby Dick Part IX
Moby Dick Part X Moby Dick Part XI
Moby Dick Part XII Moby Dick Part XIII

 

Ahab, though initially conceived, of as an epic hero, doing battle with enemies of an equally heroic stature – he is ‘…used to deeper wonders than the waves…’ and has fixed his lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales' (80) -is prevented from ever realising the potential of this stature because he is motivated by a personal revenge. One is only able to see this battle in terms of a clash between cosmic good and cosmic evil, between those forces in the world dedicated to achieving truth and those dedicated to ignorance of the nature of reality if one accepts the terms in which Ahab assesses that world. He becomes a completely self-referential character, and one that has grave doubts about that self-constructed framework. Melville does not deal in definitive statements, but it is significant that Ahab dies in a last frenzied attempt to spear the whale, a symbolic action suggesting the feeling that all languages, all visions diverge from an ineffable reality.

There are ample warnings in Moby-Dick against worshipping complexity for its own sake, concentrating chiefly in Ishmael's attempts to come to terms with the whale. Already he has realised the danger of Ahab's vision, it is equated with insanity. The realisation that to describe mundane phenomena in terms of a symbolic truth is dangerous, is one that has come early to Ishmael, though at the opening of the narrative, it remains for him an untested view. He satirizes the coast-bound Manhattans and their 'ocean reveries’ relating such activities to the Narcissus legend, the victim of the 'Tormenting mild image’ of his own reflection. Clearly, for Ishmael, the vision that Ahab represents is both ultimately ineffective -it produces a reflection of the self at best - and fraught with dangers. He likens this vision to a trance-like state, finding himself ignoring his own warnings. When on watch in the mast-heads, he finds himself reducing everything to an abstraction and finds that the consequences of such reduction are perilous indeed. It can lead to a destruction of one's own identity, and for Ishmael, could as easily lead to his physical destruction:

 

'…while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all and your identity comes back in horror… with one shriek you drop through that transparent air... no more to rise forever.'
(ch.35)


When one reads in The Confidence-Man, written shortly before Moby-Dick, the despairing 'What are you; who am I ?Nobody knows who anybody is', (p.99) we find an apparent acceptance of confusion and the abandoning of the search for meaning, not to be found in Ishmael's narrative. He declares war on all ambiguities; with regard to the meaning of the whale, he claims he will ‘…grope down into the bottom of the sea after them, …have one’s hand among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world.’ (117)