As the pursuit of the whale goes on, as the Pequod encounters the sperm whale and the right whale, and kills them, fastens them to its side, and dismantles their corpses, getting sperm oil from one and whalebone from the other, as they watch the spout of the whale from the distance, or see, at midnight, an apparition of a spout, perhaps a portent, perhaps jetting from the head of Moby-Dick himself: as they sample the whale as food, as they render down its blubber into oil, as they watch the sharks thrust their slithering upturned mouths at the carcass, as they squeeze the lumps of cold, solidified fat back into liquid; as all the events and preparations take place, the whale finally emerges as a complete body. What the whale is to the whaleman and what he is to the artist; what he is to the naturalist and what he is to the merchant; and what he is in the chase--and in the museum--and in human history--all these things come forth. There is not one method of knowledge: every manifestation in human experience contributes to the reality of the whale itself. No one lives to himself, or comprehends himself, except by establishing relationships with that which is outside himself: man gives to the whale something that the creature is incapable of giving back: his own needs, his own desires, his own understanding. Melville no more forgets the aesthetics of whaling than he forgets the economics. He is a free spirit: he explores everything, embraces everything, reports on everything. We must not confuse Moby-Dick with the monomaniac captain who belongs to the fable: the book itself has a hundred sides, and is the precise opposite of that narrow quest. For immediate action, people forget many of these relations: the artist or the scientist is just as narrow in his interests as Flask, just as single-minded in his pursuit as Ahab. But Melville is neither Flask nor Ahab nor artist nor scientist: he philosophizes out of a completer experience and a more coherent consciousness than any of these partial figures. The whale is no phantom symbol; and this stage is no pasteboard stage. If this is not the universe, the full universe, that Melville embodies under these symbols, no one in our time has had inkling of a fuller one. Moby-Dick is an imaginative synthesis; and every aspect of reality belongs to it, one plane modifying the other and creating the modelled whole.
6
The ship sails on: she meets other ships and the crews mingle in a conversation or “gam.” But Ahab restlessly drives on towards his ultimate goal: to each captain his first question is--“Hast seen the White Whale?”
Passing through the straits of Sunda, which divide Sumatra from Java, the Pequod spies great semi-circles of whale-jets sparkling on the horizon: she spreads sails after the Grand Armada; and presently, the boats are in the midst of it: among sires and cows and calves, the big and the little, spouting, playing, plunging, frantically mobbing the whale-boat, a tumult of power and virile energy on the outskirts of the Armada, but safe within the circle, calm and bliss, dalliance and delight, calves milking their mothers, and amorous bulls warm-bloodedly a-wenching. The boats, luckily, get out of this jam and tumult without damage; but while they set their pennoned poles on many, only one of the drugged whales is captured. This is but one of a score of scenes in Moby-Dick that remain in the memory like a personal experience: one exclaims with Ishmael: I was one of that crew, I pulled in that boat, I floundered around in those waters. A thousand things happen in life with less vividness and impact than they make in these printed pages: the Straits of Sunda are nearer than the neighbouring street.
Shortly after this encounter, the chase grows hotter: the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London, and the Samuel Enderby has met Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab cannot contain himself: his gam with the English captain ends abruptly, and, with the blood pounding in his veins, he springs back to the ship--so precipitately that his ivory leg is shattered and the carpenter must fit him with a new one. The indignity increases Ahab’s impatient pride: “Here I am,” he exclaims, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-debtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” Ahab causes a new harpoon head to be forged: he mans his own boat with the mysterious figures that had crept on the Pequod in the twilight of the morning they left Nantucket, Orientals, led by a Parsee, Fedallah. But at every move, Ahab stumbles on some new obstruction, or delay; and his words become more frenzied, while the effort of his will leaves a white scar of terror wherever his lightnings momentarily strike. When the Bachelor, homeward bound, full of oil, seeks to detain the Pequod for a friendly parley, Ahab leaves it behind with a curse.
Against the under-chorus of Stubb’s common sense and Starbuck’s prudent humanity, Ahab’s shrieks mount more wildly: he even throws the quadrant overboard, to steer by compass, fathom-line, and dead reckoning. In the last extremity of pursuit, in utter arrogance of purpose, he thrusts aside the quadrant as the foolish toy and baby’s plaything of haughty admirals and commodores and captains: in the final issue of life and death, science is impotent: it can but tell where the ship is on the planet, but not where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be tomorrow noon. Now the Pequod must ride out a typhoon; and in the midst of the electric storm, three corposants, tapers of white flame, appear on the three lightning-rods of the masts. For Ahab, his purpose is only beating nearer its goal: instead of bowing to the blind forces around him, the storm, the sea, the lightning, the whale, his resolution is more deeply fortified. Note his words: there are none more sudden and final with meaning in the whole book.
“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence will thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. O thou clear spirit, of the fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
Everything conspires against Ahab’s deed: the compass needle goes wrong: the log and line, hitherto seldom used, snap off when they are heaved: a man is lost overboard and the life-buoy that was sent over after him springs a leak and goes down with him; finally, another whaler, the Rachel, that has lost a boat’s crew with the captain’s son aboard, seeks to stay Ahab, so that the Pequod may help in the search: Ahab refuses this call of humanity. One being alone almost defeats Ahab, not Starbuck, who, rifle in hand, is tempted to kill Ahab and end his crazy pursuit, but Pip, the little Negro idiot, whose devotion rises as the isolation of Ahab grows. Ahab flees from him: his love, faith, devotion move him from his purpose as no disasters or portents have hitherto moved him. “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him,” Ahab admonishes himself. The boy is black, and an outcast. The black is an idiot, and so doubly an outcast. From one as mad and isolated as himself, Ahab receives love, a love deep as his own sense of pride and power, and he is almost unmanned by it. “Spite of a million villains,” says Ahab, “this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man.” But love has come too late: the chase goes on.
As Ahab nears Moby-Dick his old humanity comes back to him. He sees his own wife and child in Starbuck’s eye, regrets her perpetual widowhood, and is lenient to Starbuck’s own desire to return to his hearth. No: more: Ahab sees his wasted years: the desolation of their solitude: the slavery of a lonely command: the dry nourishment this isolated soul has fed upon--forty years of waste and forty years of folly since, as a lad of eighteen, on a mild sweet day, he struck his first whale, a boy-harpooner of eighteen. How is it that in spite of all this he pursues his purpose? What keeps him pushing and crowding himself all the time, recklessly making himself ready to do what in his own nature he had no desire to accomplish?