Melville’s reply mentions that he had been vaguely aware that there might be “allegorical constructions” in the book, but allegory is not a term that properly applies to it. Here, and often in Hawthorne’s work, people and events take on a symbolic charge, but symbolism begins to approach allegory only when, on the level of ideas, the suggested meanings begin to be as coherent among themselves as are the things, people, and events in the basic story line.

Earlier in the century Edgar Allan Poe had argued that allegory was no longer an appropriate genre for the modern writer, and while he did not elaborate, it is because allegory works best when it refers to a rich, inherited system of thought widely believed in the general culture. When, in the immensely popular Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), John Bunyan struck a note by describing the Slough of Despond or the Delectable Mountains, the Hebraic-Christian tradition rang like a bell to thicken the resonance of the image. Strong allegory is handmaiden to established order and belief, and in Melville’s more secular time that tradition was not available in the same measure, nor was Melville a comfortable believer.

Melville was drawn to Hawthorne’s work for a number of reasons, and while concern for the darker shades of human nature was central in that attraction, Melville must have recognized a literary sensibility in some ways like his own. As the critic Richard Chase pointed out long ago, they are among a number of American novelists whose work reaches toward general meanings and abstractions more overtly than the fiction of, say, Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollop in England, who inevitably have such attitudes, but who embed them more deeply in particular characters doing particular things. Hawthorne used the term “romance” rather than “novel” when writing about his work, and both he and Melville often work through what Ahab calls “linked analogies,” the dramatized and oblique suggestions of symbolism, and they are less absorbed in the daily muck and ruck of life than many other writers.

But whatever their similarity, there are differences between them even on this score. As Hawthorne’s notebooks show, he often began to think about a story with a general idea, often a moral statement, and then developed characters and situations to embody it. Melville began in the opposite way: Actual sights or events would catch his interest, and they would take on symbolic suggestion after the fact. Melville began with the world, while Hawthorne sought it out.

That Melville in his last two novels moved in Hawthorne’s direction may help explain why the creativity of both men diminished well before the end of their lives. Both Pierre (1852) and The Confidence-Man are fascinating works, but both are overtly intellectual in the sense that the issues they address are at least as much in view as their characters, whose actions serve to raise problems whether they are solved or not. Both books cry out for “interpretation.”

This is a different orientation to fiction than that of the author who is primarily caught up in the lives of his characters as they work out their fates in the world we all know. The diversity of human life is without end, and such a writer can continue with vitality as long as energy and imagination hold out. But everyone has only a limited repertoire of ideas, and the writer who puts ideas first is more likely to run out of material. Individual artistic gifts are unpredictable, of course, but Hawthorne’s late romances were left unfinished, and Melville fell silent as a writer of fiction not only because his audience turned away but because he had said what he wanted to say in prose; he therefore turned to poetry.

In Moby-Dick Melville was in the flood of his powers, and modern readers have been endlessly interested, often coming to varied conclusions because the book’s most striking images and actions seldom have one clear meaning on which everyone can agree. Symbolism in this novel is well illustrated by “The Doubloon” (chap. XCIX), in which members of the ship’s crew examine the images on the coin that Ahab has nailed to the mast as a reward: Each makes a different interpretation, and this is in miniature the pattern for the whole work. Melville does not urge on us his own reading of the novel as a whole, and up to a point varied conclusions are legitimate as long as they are put forth with evidence and tact.

Meanings

When one contemplates life-chances as portrayed in Moby-Dick, the narrator’s most striking gift is his ability to navigate cheerfully between the opposing forces of nature and the alternating appetites of mind, his compass the lessons of experience. There are few certainties in the world, and wisdom is to live as one can, in the face of mysteries, without pretending that they are anything else. A recurring image in Melville’s work is a language that cannot be deciphered. One sperm whale is “marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back!” (p. 249), and another is compared to the huge wine-cask in Heidelberg that is “mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematic adornment of his wondrous tun” (p. 398). The tattooing on Queequeg’s body holds

a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!” (p. 554).

In a world where much is mysterious and experience evokes contrasting emotions, visions of good and evil both become dangerous when the focus on one obscures the other: The inattentive optimist will fall to his death (p. 198) and the obsessed contemplator of evil may well bring that about (p. 492). Nature is both our mother and our murderer: “When beholding that tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it” (p. 564). White is the symbol of innocence but is also “the colorless, all-color of atheism” (p.