Moby Dick and America

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am by Peter Leithart

Moby Dick and America 2017-09-07T00:10:17+06:00 Peter Leithart

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The following summarizes the argument of David W. Noble in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden .

In Redburn , Melville wrote, “We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and peoples are forming into one federated whole; of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in Eden . . . . The Seed is sown, and the harvest must come.”

But during his voyages and his time on a South Sea island, he came to recognize that natural man is a corrupt as civilized man.

Noble writes, “Melville’s South Sea novels are essays in disenchantment,” and in response to this disenchantment, he turned to Hawthorne in an effort to sort through things. Noble claims that Moby Dick is, like The Scarlet Letter , “an allegory of the myth of the New World Eden.” He expands on this point: “Ishmael, like Arthur Dimmesdale, will achieve spiritual salvation by accepting his membership in ‘the sinful brotherhood of mankind.’ Captain Ahab is a Roger Chillingworth placed in command of the Pequod. And Melville’s description of the horror of his rule exceeds the warnings inherent in the portrait of Hawthorne’s Puritan ideologue. Driven by the sin of pride and dedicated to perfection, Ahab destroys himself an al those who follow him. Melville was more pessimistic, more gloomy about the Jacksonian generation than Hawthorne because he could see the pull of greed strengthening the sacrilegious quest for an earthly paradise.”

Moby Dick is set in a fallen America. The frontier has given way to the city: “The redemptive force of nature has been lost in this great center of commerce. Mankind, temporarily purified by the rural American landscape, is once more driven into disharmony by the artificial complexity of the city.” The sea, however, seems to be an unspoiled natural world, and Ishmael goes to sea to drive out the “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” which is inducted by the city and land. Like earlier Americans, Ishmael is “attempting to recapitulate the exodus of his ancestors from the crowded cities of Europe, across the purifying waters of the ocean, to a promised land in the west where death, the badge of the ineradicable imperfection of the Eternal Adam, would no longer haunt mankind.”

But Ishmael’s devotion to nature is “a sham.” He looks to the sea only to “find confirmation of the perfect he imagines to exist in his own soul,” projecting his “dream of inward perfection” on the water. Americans don’t believe they need the cleansing of water; they have already achieved paradise. But Melville wants to show that this is mere hubris, because Americans have not achieved their paradise. They will find only death in nature, not life: “Worshiping themselves, they have set up a false idol – nature – to mirror their self-love; they have lost the essential ingredient of the Christian faith, humility born of recognition of the Eternal Adam that is in all men.”

Ahab is an example of American hubris taken to an insane extreme.
Personally, he motivated by a kind of metaphysical sense of revenge. He has lost his leg to the White Whale, and he intends to strike out against the White Whale and against whatever power that stands behind it. He wants to punch through the pasteboard mask of visible reality, and strike at the thing that permits evil in the world. His quest is titanic, but ultimately doomed. Moby Dick lures Ahab, as Yahweh lured the biblical Ahab, to his death. As a symbol of American hubris, he is aiming to establish an American Eden, freed from the curse of original sin. And Melville’s message – through Ishmael, the sole survivor – is that this quest is doomed. It can only lead to death, not only for the captain of the ship but for the melting-pot crew of the vessel.

The monied interests in the book are professing Christians. Bildad and Peleg are pious, but they are willing to send out the insane Ahab as pilot their ship, because they assume he can keep the crew in good discipline in order to bring in a profit. Starbuck’s feeble opposition to Ahab arises from the same motives. He wants Ahab to think more about “sperm” and less about the White Whale. The profit motive is supposed to put some brakes on Ahab’s quest to destroy the evil of the White Whale. But it’s a weak motive, and it can’t stop Ahab from moving forward with his quest.

As Ishmael meditates on the fire, he thinks of the sun dispelling all gloom and devilry. But then his thoughts turn to the ocean, and to other natural signs that darkness is built into the world. It’s acceptance of this reality that makes him a witness, that brings him a kind of salvation.

Queequeg poses an alternative to American hubris. A pagan, he comes to America thinking that he can learn perfection from them, but soon finds that the Christians of America are no better than pagans. He determines to live and die a pagan, and thinks that the pagans have a mission to the American people: “We cannibals must help these Christians,” he says. He is a salvific figure throughout the book: He rescues men who fall overboard, and his coffin saves Ishmael at the end of the book, leaving Ishmael as the one witness to all that has happened. What makes Queequeg a legitimate alternative is that he is free from the greed and from hubris. He recognizes that he is destined for death; he sleeps in his coffin during the last part of the voyage.

Ishmael is willing to get into bed (literally) with Queequeg, and claims that Presbyterian and Pagan are in the same boat together. This is a picture of radical tolerance, but also a picture of a kind of community that America has rejected. This is a community of the doomed, of those who accept death and original sin. For Ishmael, redemption comes through recognition of Adam within. Redemption occurs through admission of original sin, not through deliverance from it.

In Moby Dick , then, the lure to get the White Whale is deadly. It’s magnificent, but it’s doomed. Ahab is not going to win. And Queequeg’s pagan resignation to death and evil seems to be the way to go. There is a grandeur in Ahab, and in the immolation, but it’s a destructive grandeur. And the same point seems to be made in Billy Budd – that there is an ineradicable evil in the world, and that one must simply accept that. The flaw is not in the stars, or in the environment, but in ourselves.

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