The nation would go on intact for a few more years, until the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision set the stage for civil war; but to astute observers it was already clear in 1850 that the dispute could be brokered no more.

Among them was Melville. Moby-Dick can be seen as a sustained meditation on the sectional crisis, and as such some readers have tried to assign specific political correspondences to its cast of characters: Ahab as the unrelenting Calhoun; Starbuck as New England prudence; Stubb as the eager Westerner; Flask, whom the “noble negro” Daggoo carries “on his broad back…[like] a snow-flake,” as exemplar of the slave South; even Moby Dick itself as the principle of whiteness in whose very pursuit the nation insured its doom.

Imputing such allegorical fixities to Melville’s text is a tempting way to distribute and gain control over its inventory of unruly characters, and Melville was certainly alert to national politics. His brother Gansevoort had been active in the Democratic party, and he himself had indulged in long stretches of thinly disguised political commentary in Mardi. But Moby-Dick is not a medieval morality play with a decipherable iconography. It is a disorderly elegy to democracy, which Melville saw as threatened on many sides: by the spirit of utilitarianism (represented comically by Bildad and Peleg), by the accelerating pace of expansionism (the Pequod is named after an Indian tribe obliterated in a seventeenth-century war with the Puritans), and by the drive toward industrial power (in the great “Try-Works” chapter the ship becomes a floating factory), which degrades men into mere instruments of a technological process. “To accomplish his object,” we are told, “Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” And yet with all his revulsion for the surging commercialism and land hunger of his time, Melville was equally suspicious of the motives and efficacy of reformers who whined from the sidelines. “With what quill,” he asks with Emersonian disdain, “did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formerly indite his circulars?”

Melville, in short, extracted a human sample from a culture he both loved and abhorred, and he made of the Pequod a kind of Noah’s ark. Its crew and officers are representatives of a nation for which the “native [white] American…provides the brains, the rest of the world [“tiger-yellow” Fedallah and “gigantic, coal-black” Daggoo] as generously supplying the muscles.” Yet it is not exactly coercion that keeps the brawn in thrall; there is no sullenness in the crew’s obedience to Ahab once it is pledged. Stubb, for instance, is a kind of petty version of Ahab; he has the scurrying frenzy of a rodent but also an “invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness” that Ahab recognizes as a complement to his own immunity to prudence. And not just the officers but the men feel an ungrudging solidarity with their captain—a solidarity that Ahab seals with the soaring oratory to which he rises when Starbuck challenges him in “The Quarterdeck”:

Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. 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 white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

These metaphysics are pitched at the first mate (who requires a “little lower layer” to break his resistance), but they are plain enough to the unlettered crew. Even as he manipulates them, Ahab knows their humanity; he knows that no man among them lives unaggrieved (even gentle Queequeg is a dispossessed king) and that all have a reservoir of pain that can be tapped by a leader who elevates common resentment to the uncommon level of heroic virtue. Like Ahab, every man feels maimed and hopes to find relief by assigning blame:

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

Arguably the most brilliant demonstration in modern literature of the power of demagoguery, “The Quarterdeck” is not so much a prophecy of immediately succeeding events in the United States as it is a preview of the mass politics of our own century. Moby-Dick is also a study in leadership whose first hopeful hypothesis is Bulkington, but one in which Ahab prevails.

Ahab’s political genius expresses itself with what Melville sometimes regards as an unrepeatable indecency: “what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.” Like all such rhetorical gestures, this diffidence is calculated to excite desire. Moby-Dick pulls the reader into Ahab’s magnetic range even as it warns us away; to read Moby-Dick is to be enchanted into the kind of self-forgetfulness from which Ishmael wakes after losing himself in the fused consciousness of the crew:

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.

It should be said that there is nothing irreducibly American about this wildness, just as there is nothing local or even finally national about the scope of Melville’s political imagination. In fact, as the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James suggested long ago, Melville’s political vision of the mirrored fanaticism of ruler and ruled was to be most fully realized in Europe and only fitfully approached in the United States. Moby-Dick is a book of universal reach about the neediness of men when they are denied the props of rank and custom; a book about what can happen to men in conditions of radical exposure. It reports their jauntiness in the murderous business of killing whales, and it is hardly blind to their profligacy and cruelty—but it also honors their courage.