Moby Dick – Chapters 41 & 42

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Some books really strike a nerve—not because we sense the author knows us, but because we sense the author was us, and then climbed higher. By recognizing ourselves in the text, we instinctively feel the author is a few steps ahead of us, and that he knows the way forward, out and over our present selves, our present condition.

That’s what attracted me to Moby Dick when I started reading it one drizzly November day. More precisely, it was the cheerful tone and wry humor of the narrator—Ishmael, Ishmael the convalescent—and how sharply it clashed with Ishmael the sailor, the protagonist in his own story. They are two different characters.

Ishmael the sailor is depressed, in despair, suicidal. He tells us that whenever he finds himself growing grim about the mouth, drawn to funeral processions, or itching to methodically knock people’s hats off in the street, he knows it’s time to head to sea. The sea, he says, is his substitute for pistol and ball.

Ishmael the sailor is in a bad way when we first meet him, but Ishmael the narrator isn’t. His tone is cheerful, amused, elevated. He’s obviously over whatever once plagued his sad protagonist. There’s a diagnosis and a promised cure in that contrast. You, the reader, empathize and identify with Ishmael the sorry sailor, but you’re drawn, magnetically, to Ishmael the lighthearted narrator. How did he do it? How did he convalesce? Melville’s suggestion is subtle and seductive: pay attention to Ishmael on this journey, because he found the way.

Now, Ahab is a character in Ishmael’s story, but more than that, he is a temptation, a warning, a foil—a path Ishmael might have taken while battling his despair, but a path which Melville shows us leads to ruin. Ishmael, ultimately, goes another way. But which way is that?

From the beginning, we see that Ishmael is defined by his openness—to the journey, the seas, to the strange cast of characters. Take Queequeg, the pagan cannibal, for example. Rather than recoiling, Ishmael gives him a chance, befriends him. They share a bed, a bond, they even wed, actually. Ishmael is open to fate. He doesn’t rage against it, like Ahab. He inspects whatever fate throws his way. He’s fascinated by it. Ahab is indignant, injured, even more, insulted, by the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune—and so he hurls a harpoon back. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. That’s Ahab.

Ishmael, on the other hand, didn’t set out to hunt Moby Dick. He didn’t even set out for whaling, for crying out loud. He just set out for the sea and stumbles onto the Pequod, the ship on which the hunt takes place. He misses the ferry to Nantucket, ends up in New Bedford, meets Queequeg at the Spouter-Inn, and follows the thread from there. He’s a leaf in the winds of fate—but he’s not exactly passive. That much is clear from the fact that he goes to sea not as a passenger, but as a sailor. Ishmael immerses himself in the life handed down to him. He’s not a passive observer of his own fate. He’s an actor, but not a petulant actor, a prima dona, railing against the scriptwriter and director. How dare they do this to my character on my hour upon the stage!

So when fate brings him to the Pequod and whaling, Ishmael dives deep. He’s not outraged. He observes his shipmates, their personalities—everything—and sketches it all for us in a series of funny little chapters. He studies whales and gives us that infamous, sprawling, punishing chapter, Cetology. On the face of it, it reads like a catalog on whales, but it’s something more. Ishmael shows his spiritual depth, hinting that the whale, to him, is not just a beastly and fearsome fish, but a mystery, a kind of sacred puzzle. He detects something else, he projects something else—something of himself, his world, something that haunts him—onto the whale. Something vast, unknowable, monstrous, maybe even divine. Fate places him on a whaling ship with a captain obsessed with hunting one particular whale—and Ishmael resolves his spiritual turmoil in that mode, as a sailor, on that ship, hunting Moby Dick. He doesn’t complain. I think I would complain.

And so we arrive at the central question:
What is Moby Dick to Ishmael?
And what is he to Ahab?

Luckily, Melville gives us two chapters—41 and 42—where he addresses these questions head on. That’s why I think of them as the beating heart of the novel.

Ishmael’s journey—from a despairing, suicidal sailor to a cheerful and convalescent narrator—runs straight through Moby Dick. But what is the white whale to Ishmael? And what is it to Ahab? Why does it destroy one, and enlighten the other? What is the proper relationship that one ought to have to Moby Dick, that white minotaur in the labyrinth of our souls?

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Ahab—

In Chapter 41, Ishmael 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, Ishmael 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”—and we’re talking philosophers, priests, saints and sages—were all physiologically unwell and, consequently, spiritually embittered. They, like Ahab, sought revenge on what they blamed for their misfortune. But unlike Ahab, being more spiritual than him, 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, or being beyond this one, to avenge themselves of what they perceived as the flaws and evils of this one. Ahab, on the other hand, reacts more like Dostoyevsky’s active man, charging decisively, monomaniacally toward the white brick walls of his cage, his life and it’s fate, even to his detriment, even to his demise.

Though profound, I don’t think that Ahab is wise or a philosopher, at least not in the traditional sense, at least as how Nietzsche sees them. He is, however, driven by the same wound that compels the wise, as Melville puts it, “a torn body and [a] gashed soul [which] bled into one another.” Like this wise men, he is animated by the spirit of revenge, revenge against fate, but unlike them, his revenge is direct, tangible, worldly. He doesn’t stare into the abyss, he hunts it, harpoon in hand.

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Ishmael—

Ishmael likens himself to a young colt raised in the peaceful valleys of Vermont—no knowledge of beasts of prey, no experience of doom. And yet, when the colt smells the wild animal musk of a buffalo, he recoils in a frenzied fright. That smell triggers something ancient—an instinctual dread of the demonism of the world.

Ishmael says that is what the whiteness of the whale means to him. Moby Dick evokes in him a dreadful, instinctual sense of death, doom—the possibility of being trampled into dust.

In the final paragraph, Ishmael tries to substantiate that dread and offers three explanations:

• He says it could be that by its indefiniteness, whiteness shadows forth—it evokes in him—a glimpse at the heartless void and immensities of the universe. Here I have a meme in mind, a series of images laid on top of one another. The first is a guy standing outside of his house, then it zooms out to show the city, earth, solar system, the galaxy, and the known universe. The last image is of a gigantic Jesus stretching his arms around the known universe with the caption, “don’t masturbate.” I think that’s the feeling. The absurdity. The pettiness of life and moralizing in the face of the immensity of it all.
• Or maybe whiteness is terrifying because it’s both all color and the absence of color. It’s undifferentiated. If everything is white, nothing stands out—there’s no form, purpose, meaning. It all becomes the colorless, all-color of atheism.
• Or maybe it’s what the natural philosophers say, that all visible qualities—what gives flavor and meaning to existence—are not actually inherent, but only laid onto it from without. In other words, whiteness trigger in him the possibility that things aren’t actually good or beautiful, and that those qualities are projected onto things. If that’s true, then light, white light, is actually corrosive. It strips the world bare, shows existence as if it were a leper, and Ishmael is like the wretched infidel who refuses to put on colored and coloring glasses and gazes himself blind looking at it.

He says the Albino Whale was the symbol of all three: whiteness as immensity and void, whiteness as all and none, whiteness as a corrosive light that strips existence bare.

In short, and this is my position, the whiteness of the whale evoked in Ishmael a dreadful and instinctual insight—that life may be without meaning. To cut to the chase, Moby Dick is Nietzsche’s abyss, and Ishmael gazes into it, and he’s fascinated by its…whiteness! The abyss is white! I always envisioned it as black.

But what is really interesting here is that Ishmael is no different than Ahab. Both of them see the “subtle demonism of life” in the white whale.

They differ in two important ways:

• First, in how they arrive at their insight—what Moby Dick is. Ahab comes to it through physical pain, his body and soul bleeding into one another. Ishmael gets there from, maybe, just his soul bleeding. Is that fair? He’s in despair from the beginning, suicidal even. We don’t know what brought him to that state, but maybe we get a clue in this chapter. We know that Ishamel returns to despair, periodically. The first chapter, Loomings, tells us he heads to sea whenever there’s a “drizzly November in his soul.” So maybe, on this reading, Ishmael met Moby Dick, what Moby dick is to him, long before he boarded the Pequod.
• Second and more significantly, Ishmael differs from Ahab in how reacts to the abyss. Their postures to it. Ahab is indignant, injured and insulted, outraged at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so he hurls some of his own back. He wants revenge, justice, or at least an enemy on whom to vent his impotent anger. Ishmael is not vengeful. He’s curious, even when he despairs, he’s fascinated by all of it, even the horror. He studies it, catalogues it, tries to understand, but not like a scholar. Ishmael doesn’t retreat from life. He’s no spectator. He immerses himself, signs onto the Pequod as a sailor, not as a passenger. If he’s a philosopher—and I think he is—he is very strange, because he rolls around in the dirt with everyone else.

So, to Ishmael, the abyss is white, and he ponders it, he’s fascinated by it, stares into it courageously, without “colored and coloring glasses,” but to be honest, I don’t really understand him. I don’t know how he does it. I know that there’s two Ishmaels, the sick and despairing one from the opening chapter, and the cheerful narrator…also evident from the opening chapter. And I know that he healed himself somehow in his confrontation with Moby Dick which almost killed him, but I still don’t know how.

How Ishmael makes himself at home in this world; how he’s capable of living in this world in full view of what it is, awful as it is, without turning to God for a solution, like King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, or a beyond like Plato and Socrates, some Hinterwelt or other, or turning into Ahab, or retreating into himself, or killing himself.

I don’t really know his secret, but I know that for Nietzsche, as far as philosophers are concerned, there’s only been two - himself and Heraclitus - who’ve managed this superhuman feat. And now, I’m thinking maybe Ishmael is a third.