Sounding the Whale

Moby-Dick as Epic Novel

Christopher Sten

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612771328
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

Sounding the Whale is Christopher Sten's comprehensive account of his own close encounter with Moby-Dick. Originally a long, self-contained chapter in The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel, just published by Kent State University Press, this chapter-by-chapter study of Moby-Dick evolved as a book within a book. Sten argues that Melville not only was familiar with the traditional forms of narrative but that he refined them and appropriated them to his own original purposes. For Moby-Dick, he fused the heroic qualities of the ancient Homeric epic with the spiritual qualities of the early modern form found in Dante and Milton, then cast the whole enterprise in an unprecedented poetic prose form. Thus he formulated the first prose epic of its kind, and the only religious epic on the subject of whaling anyone is likely to write. As Melville's most ambitious novel, Moby-Dick requires careful and responsive reading. For a clear understanding of the intricacy and depth of Melville's story, of the subtleties of the quest, one is likely to need a guide. This book is that guide.

Sounding the Whale:
Moby-Dick as Epic Novel

At the end of his now famous review, written in the late summer of 1850 while composing Moby-Dick, Melville predicted that Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse would one day be regarded as his masterpiece. “For,” he explained, “there is a sure, though a secret sign in some works which prove the culmination of the powers (only the developable ones, however) that produced them.” Whether Melville had read any of Hawthorne’s other works at this time is unclear. Still unacquainted with the man himself, or so he professed, he apparently did not know that Hawthorne had published The Scarlet Letter earlier that same year.¹ Even so, Melville had the good sense to hedge his bets by adding that he hoped the older writer would yet prove his prediction wrong, “Especially,” he explained, “as I somehow cling to the strange fancy, that, in all men, hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult properties—as in some plants and minerals—which by some happy but very rare accident (as bronze was discovered by the melting of the iron and brass in the burning of Corinth) may chance to be called forth here on earth; not entirely waiting for their better discovery in the more congenial, blessed atmosphere of heaven.”²

What is remarkable about this rather droll version of Emersonian philosophy is that it captures the same conviction regarding the potency of transcendent powers, the same conception of life, even the same theory of art that Melville was then trying to infuse into his own masterwork. The calling forth of wondrous, occult properties, that rare but happy accident in the life of humankind, is the central subject of Melville’s great story. In its most heightened form, it is also the subject of the world’s great modern epics, particularly spiritual epics, such as the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, that tell the story of a hero who makes a life-transforming journey into the deepest realms of the self and back out again.

Since 1950, when Newton Arvin and Henry F. Pommer first examined the matter in some detail, many critics have gone on record as calling Moby-Dick an epic or acknowledging it has significant ties with the epic tradition.³ But there have also been many who have questioned such a designation and argued instead for the influence of some other genre, particularly tragedy, romance, or anatomy, or some heterogeneous combination of genres. Even some who advocate reading the book as an epic, such as Arvin or, more recently, John P. McWilliams, have expressed reservations about the term or claimed the book finally eludes generic classification. Clearly, Melville’s critics are far from agreement on the matter, despite the fact that it is one of the most analyzed texts in all of American literature. Even among critics who are predisposed to see the book as an epic, there is some disagreement about the qualities that make it so.

While there are several reasons for such disagreement, much of it, I would say, stems from the fact that even as an epic Moby-Dick is an unusually ambitious work that brings together two epic traditions rather than one: the ancient or primitive national epic of combat or conflict, as in the Iliad or Beowulf, and the modern universal epic of spiritual quest, of the search for a transcendent order or significance to human life, as in the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost. Though in Melville’s treatment the two are in fact woven together to form a single story, with each of the two major characters crossing the line into the other’s epic territory, the first can be said to focus generally on Ahab and the second on Ishmael.

While much of my discussion centers on Ahab and the ancient epic of combat, my principal point of focus throughout is on Moby-Dick as a spiritual epic. The later tradition envelopes the earlier one, as Ishmael’s story envelopes Ahab’s. As more and more critics in the twentieth century have testified, this is Ishmael’s story even more than it is Ahab’s, important as Ahab’s is, and so the parallels with the spiritual epic are more pervasive, and more profound, than the parallels with the primitive epic of physical courage. Moreover, given Melville’s symbolic technique, which in an epic work is designed to infuse the quotidian world with significance and elevate mundane matters to the supernatural plane, the theme of the quest for the soul takes on an overriding importance. The ancient epics, too, of course had a spiritual dimension in that they were intended to explain the intrusions of the gods into the affairs of humankind; they were, as Arthur Hutson and Patricia McCoy, among others, have said, concerned in a fundamental way with mythology.⁴ But, beginning with Dante, the epic became essentially inward, and not simply psychological but spiritual, centering on the search for the soul or the soul’s salvation. As an epic of the universal story of mankind, therefore, Moby-Dick is more than a local instance of mythmaking or nation-building, comparable for its time and place to the Odyssey of ancient Greece or the Aeneid of early Rome. It is also Melville’s attempt to show that the powers behind the great spiritual epics of the world are the same powers that propelled its major religious mythologies—Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Egyptian, among others Melville knew quite thoroughly⁵—and that they were as alive in his own day as they had been in those earlier times.⁶

My understanding of Melville’s conception of epic writing has been much informed by several searching studies of the epic poem, especially work by Lascelles Abercrombie, Albert Cook, and John Kevin Newman.⁷ However, my understanding of Melville’s conception of the epic journey or quest in particular is even more deeply indebted to the work of several modern students of psychology, religion, and myth, especially C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, who define life, and the quest, in terms of individuation or spiritual awakening and otherwise explore, from a modern, broadly psychological point of view, the gap between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown worlds. Campbell offers the classic formulation, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, though he in no way restricts his discussion to the epic per se, when he says that the hero’s journey is structured like the “monomyth” found in rites of passage, with their three-part structure of separation, initiation or trial, and return. As Campbell says, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”⁸ The Greek legends of Prometheus and Jason, the biblical narratives of Moses and Christ, the legend of the Buddha, and the epic stories of Odysseus and Aeneas all follow this basic pattern, typically represented in terms of the hero’s being swallowed by a monster and then being reborn.

When seen in relation to Moby-Dick, such a scheme, with its emphasis on transformation and the turning toward spiritual self-knowledge, naturally points to Ishmael as the true hero of the book; he alone completes an initiatory test and returns to tell about it, though the nature of his “boon” may at first seem problematic. By contrast, Ahab resists the test, even as he resists all reminders of his mortality. In Eliade’s terms, he clings to his existence as a “natural” man and is never “born to the spirit.”⁹ As is often the case, however, there are larger social and political consequences to such resistance. Entrusted with the power to rule others, Ahab is an instance of the public man turned private person. Like the king who becomes a tyrant, a dangerous figure known in myth and folklore as “Holdfast,” he sacrifices the public good for his own benefit.¹⁰ Unredeemed and unreborn, Ahab is incapable of recognizing anything beyond his own egoistic needs, and as a consequence he brings not health nor treasure nor sacred knowledge but ruin and death to his people and to himself.

In the following discussion, I have taken a cue from Ishmael, a model anatomist, and dissected Moby-Dick into pieces, in this case five sections of nearly equal length. I have done so for practical reasons and as a convenience to the reader, who would no doubt otherwise find this an impossibly long discussion. But I have done so also to call attention to a five-part structure that I believe is inherent to the narrative itself. This structure takes its definition from the stages in the whale hunt that forms the basic story line of the book: (1) preparations for the hunt (chapters 1–23); (2) presentation of the lore of the whaling industry (chapters 24–47); (3) the pursuit of the whale (chapters 48–76); (4) capturing the whale (chapters 77–105); and (5) the trial in the whale’s “belly” (chapters 106–35). For each of these parts, I have appropriated a corresponding section title from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to indicate in a shorthand form how Melville unfolds the central themes of the hunt for the great White Whale. Both works, in fact, the one for the nineteenth century and the other for the twentieth, make extensive use of many of the same central images, of death and burial, of games and the hunt, of fire and water, of lightning, thunder, and rain. More importantly, both are epic works that tell much the same story of a devastated land, a wounded fisher king, and the search for a holy elixir or precious fluid, whether of whale oil or water.¹¹

The first clues that Moby-Dick belongs with the world’s great epics are to be found in the etymology and extracts sections of the book’s frontmatter. Here, Melville creates the impression that his subject is universal and that, like the old oral epics, his story is a work of bricolage. To appropriate a distinction first made by Lascelles Abercrombie, one of the pioneering students of the form, the extracts are the epic material—“fragmentary, scattered, loosely related, sometimes contradictory”—out of which Melville’s epic poetry was made.¹² Even before the current storyteller, in this case Ishmael, had come along to put together the pieces, there had been earlier bards, in sundry cultures and languages, who sang of his subject. By implication, the whale is everywhere and immortal. The etymologies and extracts help to establish the epic stature, formidableness, and inexhaustibility of Ishmael’s subject, and they serve to place the reader in an appropriate mood of awe or wonder.

Yet they also help to establish the character of Melville’s storyteller, even before he introduces himself. They suggest the compiler himself to be a broken, searching, strangely modern figure, sometimes a lexicographer, sometimes a sub-sub-librarian, and at other times an author or a whaler, whose world is fragmented almost beyond repair—a man so preoccupied with the beast of destruction as to be at once possessed and at the same time paralyzed. Like Tiresias, the narrator of Eliot’s poem, he is all but overwhelmed by the oppressiveness of death and destruction, trapped in a past without change, and can therefore do little more than murmur, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”¹³ Together, the extracts reveal the compiler’s fixation on Leviathan, the ancient initiator of the Last Things, at the same time they reveal his numbness, or shock, and his inability to make sense of what he has lived through.

But the opening extracts have a redemptive function as well.¹⁴ Like the scattered pieces of a fertility god, they await the water that will restore life to the dead land, and its people, in some distant spring. In effect, they are like seeds of the hero’s renewal, as the writings of the past often are. But their mystery first must be unlocked; a worthy hero who can show the way must make himself known. Even before the story begins, then, Melville hints at important parallels between his story of the wounded Ahab, named for a despised Old Testament king, and the ancient myth of the impotent Fisher King, whose land has been devastated by his own selfishness and who now awaits a cure.

One final word of introduction: As almost anyone who has ever looked closely into Melville’s novel knows, Moby-Dick is an incredibly rich and complex work with as intricate a set of symbols, image patterns, and motifs as is to be found in a work of literature anywhere in the world. One of the things I hope to show in the succeeding pages is that there is a logic to Melville’s patterning, a logic driven by his understanding of and excitement for the epic genre but given form by a language of nature that is universal—of decay and rebirth, of seasonal cycles, of water, fire, thunder, lightning. I cannot, of course, say whether Melville himself was fully conscious of the intricate web of relations I trace in this chapter. But I believe that, as he himself said in his review of Hawthorne’s Mosses, there is something “wondrous” or “occult” about certain instances of the creative process that make them transcend what can normally be expected in such matters. Certainly to those of us who have never written an epic, particularly one of such depth and grandeur and richness as Moby-Dick, there is something preternatural about the form itself. Perhaps it is true, too, that there is something preternatural also about the effort required to produce one.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Like the Divine Comedy, The Waste Land, and other spiritual epics, Moby-Dick opens with its hero in a fallen state of emotional torpor and confusion. Starting his story before his transforming experience on the Pequod, Ishmael says he is like a spiritually dead man in a spiritually dead land, seeking the relief of the condemned everywhere. He has grown weary of existence, as one does when his youth is spent and he finds himself, as Dante said at the start of his story, “In the middle of the journey of our life.” He experiences depression, morbidness, even thoughts of suicide, and he hungers for change or escape.

Like Ahab, Ishmael suffers from a malaise or schism in the soul, an aggression so intense as to prove deadly to himself and others. As Ishmael confesses, it is only by holding to “a strong moral principle” that he can keep himself from “deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off.” Whenever he finds himself overtaken by such an urge, he knows it is “high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” However, whether this is to be viewed as a still surer means of realizing a deep-seated death wish or as an alternative to it, a means of regaining his health, Ishmael himself seems a little unsure. Going to sea, he says equivocally, “is my substitute for pistol and ball.”¹⁵ Even if he himself is unsure, his unconscious knows there must be a dying to the world before there can be a rebirth. That is the only way one can ever hope to overcome the death of the spirit. Ahab’s example attests to that by his failure, as Ishmael’s example does by his success. For the hero to come back as one reborn, filled with creative energy, as Ishmael does when he returns to tell his tale at the end, he must first give up the world and everything in it.

It is significant, but not widely recognized, that Ishmael is not alone in his suffering, that he is a representative figure or exemplary hero. “If they but knew it,” he writes, “almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me,” and as proof he has to look no further than his own fellow “Manhattoes.” Everywhere he looks, on a dreamy Sunday afternoon, he sees “crowds of water-gazers,” thirsting for the adventure that will free them from the land and the deadly routine of their lives. All of them, “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries,” hunger for that deeper, vivifying knowledge of the spirit that going to sea makes possible. “Meditation and water,” Ishmael explains, “are wedded forever” because, as the Greeks were the first to learn, introspection is the way to self-understanding (3–4). However, as the example of Narcissus warns, such inwardness can be a dangerous business; it must not lead simply to a love for the self or a fascinated preoccupation. It has to be conducted as an active search for and testing of the self; it has to involve a trial. Few people get beyond the stage of being weekend water-gazers because they are afraid of the challenge of the new, afraid of what the unfamiliar might hold. They thus remain among the dead, “victims” whom one day a more adventurous soul, like Ishmael, will come back to try to rescue, and so on, in an endless cycle.

What distinguishes Ishmael from these more timid Manhattanites is simply that he accepts the call to the sea. He does so, to be sure, without full understanding of what he is doing or why, but he is the sort of man who lives intuitively and knows to trust his inner promptings wherever they might lead him. Because the episodes in his journey represent trials of the spirit, psychological trials, his passage is inward as much as it is across land or water—“into depths where obscure resistances are overcome,” as Campbell explains, “and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.”¹⁶

In Moby-Dick this inner realm is of course represented by the sea, a universal image of the unconscious, where all the monsters and helping figures of childhood are to be found, along with the many talents and other powers that lie dormant within every adult. Chief among these, in Ishmael’s case, is the complicated image of the Whale itself, which is all these things and more and also serves as the “herald” that calls him to his adventure. At the end of chapter 1, “Loomings,” with its promise of some distant, portentous engagement, Ishmael reveals that his chief motive for wanting to go whaling “was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.” But that he is responding as much to a lure from within the self as from without is suggested in the final lines of this opening chapter, when he asserts that, having examined his motives and finding the idea of going whaling to his liking, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated in my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” (7). For Melville’s hero, this phantom whale that is later incarnated as the great White Whale is the beginning and the end, and it represents all the instinctual vitality locked deep within the self. It is in this sense that the Whale is synonymous with “the ungraspable phantom of life” that is “the key to it all” (5).

Because the way of the hero is through a strange realm filled with danger and hardship, he requires the help of a guide or wisdom figure, some master of the world beyond who can provide the kind of assistance that, to the neophyte, seems magical. As in any initiatory experience, the novice has to be instructed in the rules of the game and have the way pointed out to him. Also, usually the guide supplies a charm or fetish that will serve to ward off danger or insulate the hero from the dark forces unleashed during this process. While the guide is sometimes a woman, like Beatrice in Dante’s vision, more typically it is a man, as in the Divine Comedy again, where Virgil assumes the role in the early stages. So in Moby-Dick Ishmael is guided through the early episodes of his journey by the masterful harpooner and mystagogue, Queequeg, a deeply if comically religious man whose home is a mythical island called Kokovoko. In keeping with such mysterious figures generally, Queequeg is both protective and forbidding, nurturing and threatening, like the complex powers of the unconscious that he symbolizes.¹⁷

When Ishmael meets Queequeg, on his first night at the Spouter-Inn, while en route to his initial whaling adventure, the unlettered cannibal seems a most unlikely candidate for a mentor in any regard, except possibly the art of embalming. Queequeg, who has been out late peddling shrunken heads in the streets of New Bedford, looks like something out of a nightmare (Ishmael, it w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Sounding the Whale
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index