Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal: it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself belongs to Heaven and Hell--all its naturalism, all its accurate detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle portion of existence--that which we agree to call civilized--is the realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed glasses.
On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing, and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.
The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard, he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks: the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.”
Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs. Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately, Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety.”
Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never reach the bottom, once land is far astern.
2
When the whale enters, the narrative for the first time pauses; and, in the pause, one discovers that the story and the people are secondary matters, while something more wide and reaching comes into the fable. The whale is a symbol in the heart of man; it has its own existence and value there: but the whale is also a creature in natural history, and its shape, its bulk, habits, anatomical characteristics, family relations, its place in politics, economics, history, and human adventure, is a further part of that natural history. The chapter on the whale, in which the various branches are listed under a sort of bookseller’s classification, into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo whales, is an excellent example of Melville’s way of assimilating and revaluating knowledge, so that what was extraneous becomes intrinsic, and what was a fact in the history of the whale becomes an element in the myth that he is weaving.
A timid writer would have left these classifications and divisions out: how on earth is one to make interesting reading out of a bare catalogue? But Melville carries the load with Olympian levity: he invents a fresh classification, unknown to Owen or Cuvier, and then, with a final dash of apparent impatience, he leaves the system uncompleted--even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, “with the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.” This absurd, bookseller’s classification, and this last touch of impatience are not due to Melville’s incompetence: the first tells us that all systems of thought have in them something arbitrary and human, and the zoologist’s classification and system is no less so than the human foot, as the standard of linear measurement: when one sees objects under the figure of eternity, the scientist’s divisions have the same limitations as the bookseller’s. In a century when only a few rare-minded mathematicians were elaborating the theory that our existing geometry was but one out of a number of possible systems, with different sets of postulates, Melville was slyly demonstrating that all our thought has this conventional basis. One may alter the convention, change the point of approach, and create a different order, equally useful, equally competent, equally true. When Melville stops abruptly without finishing his own work, he points out to us that knowledge of all sorts belongs to an infinite series: there is no final stopping-place: and he who thinks his system is complete has only demonstrated his own limitations.
Although Melville plays with science, he utilizes all that it can give him, and he never seriously departs from its findings except in taking the fisherman’s view that the whale is a fish, and not, as is actually the case, an aquatic mammal. But the whale that science investigates, the whale that is stranded on the beach, or whose skeleton is suspended in mid-air in the natural-history museum, is not, however thoroughly it may be dissected and articulated and labelled, the whole whale, even for science; for a whale, like every other creature, has a habitat, relations with other living creatures, and certain ways of functioning, moving, mating, finding food; and there is a sense in which one is as near to the scientific truth about a whale when one is fighting the creature in an open boat, as when one is counting its vertebrae, examining its tissues under a microscope, or comparing its skull with other mammalian skulls. Melville gives a completer account of the whale than the anatomists: he approaches it with a harpoon as well as a dissecting-knife: he observes its characteristic reaction to stimuli as well as the organs by means of which these reactions are effected. On the other hand, the physical pursuit of the whale is only a part of the story: the more one learns about such a creature, the more widely do its relations ramify, not merely in its own world, but in man’s: and the higher the significance of the hunt itself. These passages about the whale and the methods of whaling, about its dignity and adventure, these comments upon the science of cetology--all these things are not uncouth interruptions in the narrative: they are profoundly part of it: the stream widens here, as the Hudson widens at Tappan Zee, without losing its flow and purpose. From now on the universal, symbolic aspect of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the other, and is by turns figure and background. The physical expanse of the book, its deliberateness of movement, its slow undulations, are necessary, like the long swells and the wide expanse of the ocean itself, to give a feeling of immensity, immensity and power.
3
Who are the men summoned together for this voyage? The chief mate, Starbuck, is a Quaker by descent, a “long earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as a twice-baked biscuit.” Starbuck is conscientious, prudent, inclined to respect outward portents and inward presentiments: above all, the memory of his young Cape wife and child bent the welded iron in his soul. Stubb, the second mate, is a different man: “A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged by the year.” Beneath these two stands little Flask, the third mate, a native of Tisbury, in Marthas Vineyard. In his poor opinion, the whale was but a species of magnified mouse or at least water-rat. If Starbuck is the prudent imaginative man, and Stubb is the competent sensible matter-of-fact man, Flask is the happy ignorant man, inclined to be waggish in the matter of whales.