Hello friends. It’s been a while. I started writing mini essays and thought I’d post one here. Is there anyone left from the old days?
Ahab’s Abyss
In Chapter 41, Melville describes what Moby Dick is to Ahab in much the same way that Nietzsche describes the world of becoming to the world weary sages. In the white whale, Ahab sees all worldly evil, “all truth with malice in it, all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain, all the subtle demonisms of life and thought.” Ahab, Melville says, “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.”
To Ahab, the whale is bitter fate itself, the merciless world of suffering-onto-death to which we are all bound. It is, in other words, what Nietzsche calls the abyss. Like Ahab, Nietzsche’s “wisest men in all the ages” were all physiologically unwell and spiritually embittered. They too sought revenge on what they blamed for their misfortune. But unlike Ahab, being more spiritual, they transferred their ressentiment onto the world itself rather than onto any particular monster within it. In other words, Nietzsche’s wise men reacted like Dostoyevsky’s “mouse,” the underground man, seething, retreating inward, and inventing a perfect eternal world to avenge themselves of what they perceived as the oppressive evils of this one. Ahab, on the other hand, reacts more like Dostoyevsky’s active man, charging decisively, monomaniacally toward a white brick wall even to his detriment, even to his demise. As he puts it some chapters earlier, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
Though deep, Ahab is not wise, at least not in the traditional sense. He is, however, driven by the same wound that compels the wise, as Ishmael puts it, “a torn body and [a] gashed soul [which] bled into one another.” Like the wise, he is animated by the spirit of revenge, but unlike them, his revenge is direct, tangible, worldly. He doesn’t stare into the abyss, he hunts it, harpoon in hand.