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March 17, 2007

ESSAY ON MOBY-DICK BY KATHRYN FREEMAN

My sister Kathryn Freeman gave me permission to print her essay, “Melville and the Deportation of Domesticity in Moby-Dick,” (Dec. 1985), which she wrote as a graduate student at Yale. I divided it into two parts because of length; the paper, including bibliography, will be continued.

Melville and the Deportation of Domesticity in Moby-Dick

Melville’s opposition of the landed and the unshored in Moby-Dick is analogous to the German diesseitig (on this side, in our world) and jenseitig (on the other side, yonder). One who has access to the jenseitig is traditionally called a prophet, the mantle of the evangelical orators of Melville’s own day. These figures emulated the Biblical prophet who is firmly grounded in his culture despite the visionary power which separates him from others. He “is not moved by a will to experience prophecy. What he achieves comes against his will. He does not pant for illumination….Prophecy is a vocation, an act of charisma and election” (Heschel, 138-39). Melville, however, complicates the role of the prophet by creating a vision of godless indeterminacy behind the veil of society’s fixed epistemology.

Because this vision, in its absolute state, would threaten the foundation of such a system, Melville presents two alternatives available to one who is compelled to “look through the shows of things into things” and find nothingness (Carlyle, 50). Melville’s two visionary questers, Ishmael and Ahab, though never personally or dramatically in conflict with each other, represent the two responses to prophetic vision: while Ishmael holds fast to his social identity despite his knowledge of the “phantom” that looms behind it, Ahab tears the veil in an unwavering confrontation that annihilates himself and the figure of absolute vision, Moby Dick.

Melville further complicates prophetic vision by associating it with the Romantic concept of sublime self-consciousness. Ishmael and Ahab, respectively, can thus be seen to represent Kant’s distinction between partial identification, “which depends as much on difference as it does on identity,” and total identification, in which “the collapse of all difference … is figured in the issue of fanaticism” (Knapp, 79). Ishmael, as the figure of partial identification, more closely resembles the traditional prophet: he “has an eye for the world….he brings home still, to our heart, the thing his own heart has been opened to” (Carlyle, 53). Yet the thing he brings home is the novel itself, a tale of the struggle to retain the protective mediation of the cultural system against the visionary horrors of the unshored.

Thus, while suspended on the mast-head, he realizes that “while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror….And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever” (214-15). The fact that Ishmael maintains his ingenuousness in the face of the “phantom” affords him the balance of vision and self-protection as he journeys through the unshored. He, therefore, dares to “wander” farther than the typical sailor. As he meditates on the power of the sea, he realizes, “Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drown….It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all” (26). This vision is of a self-conscious sublime. Wordsworth asks in “Grasmere Lake,” “Is it a mirror—or the Nether Sphere?” Ishmael realizes that it is both, but his answer is not Ahab’s: he returns to “landed” mediation by holding fast to the mast-head.

Granting a long pause between the first two sentences of the novel, then, one can detect a double image of Ishmael from the novel’s inception: “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mid how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” No sooner are we introduced to the Biblical pariah than the tone shifts: a congenial voice drops us back into the immediacy of our own world. This second voice appeals to us through the familiar: financial frustrations, the claustrophobia of routine, and most important, the ease with which the speaker initiates the truant’s escape from toil. The narrator thus introduces himself paradoxically as both pariah and hero-as-citizen. Unlike the traditional prophet, Ishmael’s vision implicates him as a social outcast: the first sentence foreshadows the ominous message from the unshored, a threat that he himself must bear to society despite his allegiance to the system.

Ishmael, we come to learn, is far from his Biblical namesake. His hold on the mast-head of civilization is an act of self-preservation reminiscent of Odysseus’s preparation for hearing the Sirens’ song: rather than covering his ears from their seduction, he has his sailors tie him up so that he can hear them without the danger of hurling himself to his death in an effort to find them. The opposing archetypal figure is Narcissus, whose unmediated yearning for total identification is the model for Ahab’s response to the phantom vision.

One way which Ishmael clings to the mast-head is by importing domestic vocabulary into unshored situations. From the beginning of the novel, he makes clear his consciousness of this self-protective act: “Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the places one lodges in” (30). Yet no sooner does he make this happy pronouncement—directly foreshadowing the humorous encounter with his “jolly bedfellow,” Queequeg—than he envisions among the paired animals of the whaling version of Noah’s ark one disturbing figure alone and ineffably white: “two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” Like Noah, he responds to the “flood” of the unshored by preserving domesticity, but what he foresees is the defiance of the solitary figure of indeterminacy.

Because of his paradoxical nature, Ishmael interprets signs in such a way that they simultaneously point him toward and yet protect him from the terror of the unshored. His first palpable sign, for instance, is a literal one, “with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—‘The Spouter-Inn—Peter Coffin” (33). Angus Fletcher observes of the prophetic quest that “resemblances met in this meandering life often strike the hero as uncanny, unheimlich” (29). Ishmael muses, “Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion” (33). Though he assuages himself with the rationale that Coffin is a common name in Nantucket, his prophetic intuition proves right: Coffins reappear off-shore as ineluctably as the whiteness itself.

The signs lead him directly to Queequeg, whose horrific aspect proves, comically in the coming episode and with grim irony late in the novel, to be a red herring in Ishmael’s anticipation of dread: The hieroglyphs etched on Queequeg’s face and blanket will be seen again on his “coffin,” that vehicle of salvation for Ishmael standing as a foil to Ahab’s “ship as hearse…Its wood could only be American” (720). Here, though, the momentary comfort Ishmael takes after the sign connecting whiteness, whaling and coffins does not impair his prophetic impulse, as it might a more fully laded character. When he tours Nantucket, he hears and retains one seemingly insignificant detail about the first settlers’ discovery of “a empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian’s skeleton” (97).

This unheimlich, pre-historical negative image of the casket as skeleton appears as one strand of the “Weaver God,” leading Ishmael through the “labyrinth” of his prophetic quest like Ariadne’s thread. Perhaps the uncanniness of finding this initial association of coffins with skeletons, containers of life and death, leads Ishmael to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, whose power is gained by inverting what is familiar:

The familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account….Subject and object, God, Nature…are uncritically taken for granted as familiar, established as valid and made into fixed points for starting and stopping….[Spirit] wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself….Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. (18-19)

This “tarrying with the negative” is most dramatically enacted by Ahab, of course. But more subtle, perhaps, is Melville’s complication of Ishmael’s prophetic role, for narratively and psychically, Ishmael must “contain” Ahab’s obsession in order to recount it.

He comes closest to losing his balance and “tarrying with the negative” inexorably in a visionary moment during which he is steering the Pequod. Again, the vision is heralded by an association of whiteness with danger: “the jawbone tiller smote my side….I could see no compass before me to steer by.” He thus inverts himself, believing that the tiller is inverted—Indeed, the power of the bone-tiller, like the Indian’s skeleton, has the power of inversion. After surviving the trace, he characteristically warns, “Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass (541-42).

Though he “saves himself by reasserting his belief in the natural sun, the principle of universal life,” the message with which he returns to society uproots and de-familiarizes its epistemology (Feidelson, 542). Ironically, then, as Ishmael mediates his proximity to the “negative” through domesticity, the unshored “dismembers” it through disorientation. The experience teaches him a distrust of landed orientation. When he later describes Ahab’s first encounter with Moby Dick, before the time of the novel, the irony of his inverted domesticity is intensified:

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, where amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. (246)

The vivid description of dismemberment figures Ahab’s obsession with the whale: it tears man limb from limb the way the knowledge it brings dismembers the familiar, in this case, the ritual celebrations of birth and marriage.

Melville comments on the cultural system not only by inverting it through the prophetic vision of Ishmael, but by including characters who are so mediated from “Absolute Spirit” that they are deaf and blind to the unshored. They are no more satisfied with such a system, and in fact, are less successful in coping with it than those who can transcend it. Perth, the blacksmith aboard the Pequod, epitomizes America as the culture of toil. His story bears a striking resemblance to Freud’s reality principle:

Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as full-time occupation, to the discipline of monogamic reproduction, to the established system of law and order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture (Marcuse, 2).

One can here appreciate the ease with which Ishmael escapes the tedium of landed life in the second sentence of the novel. Perth is like Ishmael on the literal level of truancy, yet he cannot achieve a vision which de-creates culture.

Perth’s early domestic situation had been Edenic: “He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like loving wife” (616). His estrangement from this paradise of domesticity is figured elliptically through a walk one “bitter winter’s midnight, on the road running between two country towns.” The claustrophobic and numbing image underscores the gradually imprisoning feeling of the landed world. “Plenty of work” becomes “stout labor’s iron lullaby,” which cannot assuage the weeping and hungry children. The alcoholism by which he tries to escape is figured as “the Bottle Conjuror,” an imagistic foil to the sensitizing rather than numbing “genius” by which Ishmael penetrates the veil of the landed. Thus, Perth’s collapse on that midnight walk is in a “leaning, dilapidated barn” where the “deadly numbness” sets in. The daughter-wife now “sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders.”

KATHRYN’S ESSAY (and bibliography) TO BE CONTINUED

Posted by Jane on March 17, 2007 2:15 PM

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