What happens when you don’t read a book?
The answer to the question I pose in the title of this piece is simply: You get the book wrong. Few have read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in its entirety, despite, in my meaningless opinion, being the greatest novel written in English. Yet so ingrained in our cultural consciousness has MD become that just about everyone knows the story — or at least think they do.
Captain Ahab, anyone will tell you matter-of-factly, is madness and evil incarnate, the result of blind zealotry in pursuit of his white whale (another trope that has entered our vocabulary). No less “authorities” than Wikipedia (“a brilliant personification of the very essence of fanaticism,” citing, apparently, some Melville biographer) and the New York Times (“Moby Dick is neither whale nor demon, but a white prop contrasting with the demonic Captain Ahab, the tormented tormentor, the malignant, abused abuser of authority and of men. Ahab’s bias is personal and color-based. A white whale becomes a blank pincushion for Ahab’s thrusting mania as Melville shades pages with his madness.” [huh?]) paint Ahab as one of the greatest villains in literature — out for revenge against the whale who took his leg. But Ahab is not a villain, no more than Ishmael is a hero. Anyone even remotely acquainted with the works of Melville knows that the man abhors absolutes. In the first two chapters of the book, “Etymologies” and “Extracts,” which are so often skipped over by any unserious reader of MD, Melville is clearly mocking man’s attempt to define and nail down his world by showing our inability to even nail down what we mean by a “whale.”
But, even if you didn’t pick up on this theme in MD — this constant interplay between opposites, with one position triumphing only to be undermined a chapter later — then surely it’s impossible to miss one of the most profound chapters in all of American literature, Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck.” In this chapter, Ahab gathers all the men around the main mast to explain to them their mission: hunt the white whale. All aboard celebrate the bounty Ahab has nailed to the main mast: a gold Spanish doubloon, which is the reward to whichever man first spies the whale. All, of course, except ever-rational Starbuck, who, like most readers (and all non-readers) of MD, mistakes Ahab’s motivations. “‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” And how mad and boring a book would MD be if that were Ahab’s motivation. Luckily, Melville, like Milton and his Satan, makes Ahab more nuanced than just about any character in any novel. Ahab replies:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me…. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak my hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” [my italics]
Ahab is an agent of justice, not revenge. How is there injustice in the world, Ahab asks? Either God is complicit with injustice, or there is no God behind the mask of this reality (see the neoplatonism here?). Who will fight for justice if not Ahab? If God exists, the whale is but an “agent” and so Ahab will strike back at the divine injustice in the world by wreaking his hate upon the whale. If God does not exist, and there is “naught beyond,” and the white whale is the principal source of injustice, then that will be the object of his righteousness.
Readers often skip over another contextual chapter, which they wrongfully believe they understand without having to read it. Chapter 9 is “The Sermon,” when Father Mapple preaches to his congregation about Jonah and the whale. Easy, people think. Ahab is Jonah and the whale is God-sent retribution for Ahab/Jonah’s sins. But read carefully! Jonah is punished because he attempted to run from God, “But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.” Ahab, on the other hand, sailed straight for God — the white whale, who was either agent or principal — to demand answers. “Woe to him,” Father Mapple goes on to say, “who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!” Faith requires total and complete acceptance, and to doubt God at all is to be doomed. But this doubt is inevitable, since man is made in God’s image and was cursed with consciousness and freedom, Melville implies. Ahab, then, turns out to be the greatest “god-like man” in the book.
At least until the Rachel. Just before the final confrontation with Moby Dick, the Pequod comes across another whaler named the Rachel. The Rachel (note again the Biblical reference, this time to childless Rachel — sidenote, how can our modern culture hope to understand itself when it can’t even recognize the ties that bind? I know few modern readers who would know the allusion to the story of Rachel) is searching for a missing whale boat that was lost the day before during a chase; the missing boat has the captain’s son aboard — in a book where a ship is the symbol of our common humanity, the Rachel is literally and figuratively searching for her children. Ahab here had the chance to chose humanity, but he did not; instead he declined to help the Rachel and turned his back on her. Here is where he crossed the line. This is why Ahab perishes and Ishmael, who consistently chose brotherhood throughout the novel, survives the sinking of the Pequod by clinging to the coffin of his “bosom-mate,” Queequeg.