It is a time-bound book of distinctively American accent, mainly in the sense that Melville realized, with his great contemporaries Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Thoreau, that the very idea of America entailed an obliteration of the past that placed unprecedented demands on the resources of the self.

 

This newness was the theme of the literary explosion between 1835 and 1855 that has come to be known as the American renaissance: the movement on behalf of which Thoreau crowed “like chanticleer in the morning” at the discovery of his radical independence; in which Whitman exulted at the dissolution of all boundaries—temporal, sexual, linguistic; and whose chief spokesman, Emerson, chided his countrymen for being slow to break the linked conventions that they confused with the self. “The…terror,” Emerson remarked in “Self-Reliance” (1840), “that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.”

The writers of the American renaissance were not, however, unanimous on this matter of scuttling the constructed self. Hawthorne, whose temperament was fundamentally conservative, reacted to his peers by becoming obsessed with the ways in which history survives as a constraining force in such an unhistorical country. And more than any of these considerable writers, Melville gave voice to both exhilaration and foreboding at the potentialities of the self unmoored:

But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

Not even in Whitman is there a more ecstatic paean to democracy. But Melville also discloses in Moby-Dick a slackened mood that Whitman concealed—as, for instance, in the great chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which he wonders aloud whether the very notion of “centre and circumference” is anything more than a fond delusion:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

As this astonishing passage makes manifest, Moby-Dick is an angry book softened by a compassion that Melville practiced on himself. He could not muster Ahab’s cavalierness at the possibility that “there’s naught beyond” the pasteboard mask. Unable to confront this possibility with equanimity, he faced it down in Moby-Dick by dramatizing it as Ahab’s suspicion and by watching its effects on a psyche not quite his own. By the time of his next novel, Pierre (1852), which he began without pause after Moby-Dick and completed in the disconsolate aftermath of its reception, Ahab’s suspicion assaults Melville himself as a certainty:

By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!

Pierre is the novel in which Melville tests for himself the limits of tolerable knowledge, and it may therefore be a nervier book than Moby-Dick, in which Melville still preserves a certain clinical detachment from the insupportable pain he is writing about. In Pierre, Melville confronts head-on the possibility that the idea of transcendence—the idea of a stable truth that exists outside of time and manifests legible meaning in the constitution of the universe—is not only undemonstrable but fatal to one’s ability to live in a contingent world. Pierre is Melville’s private howl at this recognition, and most readers have found the urgency of its prose not only incessant but frantic. In Moby-Dick Melville still manages to keep Ishmael’s intellectual play with the idea of a contingent universe apart from Ahab’s visceral rage. The result is the contrapuntal structure of the book—an aesthetic and, I think, a self-therapeutic triumph that Melville was never to achieve again.

In Moby-Dick it is “Ahab and anguish [who] lay stretched together in one hammock,” and it is Ahab whose “torn body and gashed soul bled into one another.” To the extent that Ahab is freakish, his pain remains a pathology about which we may speculate rather than an articulate anguish that we recognize as a constituent part of our own experience. Melville also lets us overhear, through the great soliloquies, Ahab quarreling with himself. Ahab sees only fragments of a human world when he looks to sea; yet even as he enumerates the inventory of loss beneath the waves, “where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot,” he knows his own embittered blindness to the “Godomnipresent…unwarped primal world” which the ocean comprehends. He longs for this world, but it is invisible to him.

Filled as it is with uncommon characters and arcane nautical terms, Moby-Dick never lets the alien world of whaling slip away into the merely exotic. Before Moby-Dick is through with us, Ahab’s hourly calculations of the white whale’s course make perfect sense. Lest our imagination relax into the voyeurism that exotic stories permit, Melville turns homely illustrations into startling images by injecting them into strangely hospitable contexts: after staving the boats of Stubb and Flask, the whale “disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” After reading this passage, can one ever move a spoon in a tureen without thinking back to it again?

Deploying these kinds of images that collapse huge distances between worlds apart, Moby-Dick reveals itself as an instance of sheer literary virtuosity. It furnishes one dazzling solution after another to the persistent literary problem of conveying to an innocent reader the palpable reality of an unfamiliar world, thereby making us feel at least potentially Ahab’s anguish as our own. Moby-Dick is not finally a statement or a puzzle or a performance—or any of the things that literary criticism would reduce it to. It is a book that begins by refusing to begin, deferring its own story by requiring the reader to force a passage through the “extracts,” which are the debris of other stories. It is a book that undercuts all its own conclusions—tutoring us in the anatomy and history of whales that are “wonderful…except after explanation”—so that it cannot properly be said to end. Moby-Dick is as nearly endless as an artifact can be. It was, and is, a gift to democracy because it compels our respect for “Men…[of] mean and meagre faces,” as well as for “man, in the ideal, [who] is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.”

To read Moby-Dick is to acquire anew this knowledge, which, despite its indispensability for a democratic culture, can be dissipated by experience. Like the whale, it “must,” if we wish truly to read it, “remain unpainted to the last.” For anyone who has experienced Moby-Dick, it is a privilege to introduce it to another reader—but a privilege that is abused if extended much beyond the invitation. As Melville says of the sperm whale’s brow, “I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”

Andrew Delbanco

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Arvin, Newton, Herman Melville (1950).

Barbour, James. “‘All My Books Are Botches’: Melville’s Struggle with The Whale,” in Writing the American Classics, ed.