The Whiteness of the Whale

If you ever read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for a class and want to make your teacher very, very angry, try to steer every conversation around to the “meaning” of the white whale itself. Your teacher won’t appreciate it, but you’ll just be following the early trends of Melville critics, for whom the whale absolutely must have represented some huge secret to the meaning of life. Is it God? Evil? Purity? Humanity? Sin? Sexuality? You name it, and someone’s proffered it as the secret meaning of the novel.

The best thing I’ve ever read on this front comes from R.P. Blackmur’s The Lion and the Honeycomb. Blackmur is pretty tough on Melville as a writer. The author’s problem, he says, is that “he did not write of characters in action; he employed the shells of stock characters, heightened or resounding only by the eloquence of the author’s voice, to witness, illustrate, decorate, and often as it happened to impede and stultify an idea in motion.” The truth of Blackmur’s assertion should be obvious to anyone who has spent any time attempting to decode the myriad symbols in Moby-Dick. Melville attempts to write an allegory here, but he fails:

Successful allegory—La Vita Nuova and Pilgrim’s Progress—requires the preliminary possession of a complete and stable body of belief appropriate to the theme in hand. Melville was not so equipped; neither was Hawthorne; neither was anyone in nineteenth century America or since. That is why Melville’s allegorical devices and patterns had to act as if they were agents in a novel; and that is why we are compelled to judge Melville at his most allegorical yet formally as a novelist.

Putting aside the question as to whether there is something intrinsic in the American character—then or now—that keeps us from having that “complete and stable body of belief,” I think that Blackmur has it absolutely right here. Moby-Dick is an allegory without a key to decoding, a mass of signifiers without steady signifieds behind them; it is, perhaps, the first poststructuralist novel.

I am generally suspicious of the type of reading—enormously popular in the 1970s and ‘80s, the tragic heyday of Critical Theory—that would claim that a given text is not about what it appears to be about at all but is instead all about the act of literary production and the attempt to interpret it. This is typically lazy reading, in my opinion, a refusal to engage with the author and a violent overlay of fashionable criticism over his or her work.

But there’s no way around it here. The author’s intention in writing Moby-Dick was clearly to demonstrate that the author’s intention doesn’t matter. Moby-Dick is such a glorious, sprawling mess, covering dozens of genres and hastily thrown together, that any attempt to map it out based on Melville’s autobiography or personal philosophy is bound to fail. It contains too much for such an approach to be at all effective. The novel deals with so many subjects and yet is “about” none of them that it can reasonably be said that what it is “about” is the concept of being “about.”

And we’re clued in on this from the very beginning. Moby-Dick does not begin at sea or even in New Bedford but rather in a library, in a series of other books. We’re given eleven pages or so of quotations about whales, presented to us by a “sub-sub librarian” —a person lost in the depths of the library, lost in a vast series of words and pages, just as the reader will shortly be. He gives us a variety of sources on whales: symbolic, literal, mythic, and so forth. But he can’t pin down the whale; nor can the reader of Moby-Dick, who could spend a lifetime concocting various signifieds for the signifier of the white whale and never get any closer.

When our actual narrator, the enigmatically named “Ishmael,” shows up, he, too, presents us with a catalogue, though in his case it is not about the whale but about the various types of people who are drawn to the ocean. His catalogue, however, has the effect of simplifying rather than complicating our interpretation—he’s making a universal case for the importance of the ocean, a universalizing moral point.

This should provide comfort and a structure for interpretation, but it doesn’t—Ishmael’s overarching point about the power of the ocean is quickly lost in the maze of genres and narratives that follow it. He doesn’t even make it to sea until ten chapters later, demonstrating that land is in fact just as important as the sea. His point has been overthrown, and Ishmael moves from being an infallible guide of the sort to which readers are used to being a voice among voices, no more important than Father Mapple or Captain Ahab or Queequeg.

And even when he does try to act as our guide, Ishmael can’t resist teasing us with the knowledge to which he is privy and we are not. For example, he refers to “an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant.” He advocates a sort of Gnosticism, a secret knowledge that only he can access; the reader cannot look for real guidance to an unfriendly speaker like him.

But the early image that best serves as an emblem for the novel itself is the painting at The Spouter-Inn. Ishmael is taken in by it, is fascinated by it, but he cannot for the life of him figure out what it’s a picture of. Then he figures it out—it’s a whale destroying a whaling-boat (a rather grim image for an inn for whalers). The painting retains its mystery, however, and in this it mirrors the novel itself.

Ishmael’s attempt to make sense of it resembles the task that critics have faced in reading Moby-Dick for decades, and Ishmael’s statement about interpretation—“at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.” But because Melville’s allegory is at the very best slippery, that thing in the middle, the meaning of the white whale, will never be truly found out, and the rest of the picture/novel will never be plain.

This is the power and the frustration of Moby-Dick, perhaps America’s first great novel and a production wholly singular in the history of literature. But to be fair, Melville tips the reader off from the very first page that this novel will not be a sign to be interpreted but rather a series of words and images, thrust together violently until they make your head spin.

Loose Ends

Anybody want to defend Nathaniel Hawthorne to me? I've always hated him (and I've read his three major novels--The Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance).

When I described my loathing to Dr. Boudreau, the graduate coordinator of UGA's English department, she asked if I'd read The Scarlet Letter since high school. I sheepishly admitted that I had not. "Give it another try," she said. "You need to read that book when you're old enough to imagine your life falling apart."

And so here I am, plowing through the book again. I do like it more than I liked it eight years ago--but I still don't connect with it the way I connect with Hawthorne's contemporary Herman Melville, who is frustrating in a totally different way. Melville's problem, as I've discussed elsewhere, is that he's a mess; his books never seemed planned at all, but instead they're Darwinist approaches to literature. He tosses everything in by chance and the cream of each reader's crop rises to the surface.

Hawthorne, on the other hand, seems to have planned every comma of The Scarlett Letter. It's masterfully controlled, but it seems to me as though that control has suffocated the book. I'm so aware of Hawthorne's intentions and his artistry that the characters can't breathe, and he won't allow me to really feel anything for them. Do any of you have a similar experience? Meredith, aren't you a Hawthorne fan?

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Meanwhile, the latest trend seems to be to question John Steinbeck's place in the literary canon. In an interesting and personal piece for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrestles with the ghost of old Tom Joad, finally coming down on neither side of the love-him-or-hate-him fence. A few thoughts on that article:

- Yardley notes that the Nobel Prize committee privileges "political orthodoxy" over "literary distinction." No kidding. Take a look at this list of Nobel Prize winners for literature; you've never heard of most of them. Look at the reasons the committees give for their choices; they will not out-and-out state that "we like this person's opinions rather than their art," but that's the subtext behind phrases like "lofty idealism" and "spiritual perception." The Prize was originally meant to go to "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency," and if the World Wars killed that notion, the committee still loves "correct" opinions.

- He also says that his love for Steinbeck abated at about the same time his love for Faulkner grew. I've always been told that's a natural progression--Steinbeck and Faulkner are never in vogue at the same time, taking as they did completely opposite (political vs. impressionistic) attitudes toward what was essentially the same mileau: poor people in the 1920s and '30s. I wonder if we'll see a rash of Faulkner-bashing ten years from now when Steinbeck re-enters the Academy.

Polished and Precise Like the Brains Behind the Gun Should Be

I'm reading Battle-Pieces, Melville's collection of Civil War poems right now. Melville is not typically known as a poet--if you've read any of his verse, it's likely only "Billy in the Darbies," the brief poem that concludes Billy Budd, Sailor. And there's a reason for that: He's mostly hamfisted, although he's got a few lines of great power. (My favorite so far is "Storms are formed behind the storm we feel." I'm not sure what to make of it, but it sticks in my brain.)

One thing Melville repeatedly suggests is that war is a young man's game, fought and apparently controlled entirely by youth while the older, wiser, and more experienced men stand beside helplessly:

Grief to every graybeard
When young Indians lead the war ("Apathy and Enthusiasm" II.21, 22).

And, more to the point:

Youth must its ignorant impulse lend--
Age finds place in the rear.
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys ("The March Into Virginia" 4-6).

I'm no Civil War scholar, but wasn't the war started by old men? Hasn't this been the case for wars all throughout history? Old men start the wars and then step aside to let young men fight them. That's certainly the rhetoric around our current war.

And so I wonder if Melville's condemnation isn't misplaced. The young fight the wars, but then, they're forced to. Theirs is the enthusiasm--the old men have the apathy, although it is only personal apathy. They're more than willing to take a vested political or economical interest in the war and then send the young men off to die for that interest.

Czeslaw Milosz seems to be much closer to the point in his beautiful, heartbreaking "Child of Europe," written in the immediate aftermath of World War II:

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
The passionless cannot change history. (5.7-8)

Milosz's sarcasm gets at the same idea as Melville but makes things clearer: It's not the young men's fault. It's the old men who behave as young men--the old men, who should know better but force themselves not to.

By the way, if anyone reading this knows more about the Civil War than I do and wants to correct my impressions, please do.

My Sister Never Made Love to Anybody Else but Me

Pierre is not a canonical Melville novel, at least not to the lay reader, who's maybe read "Bartleby the Scrivener" and at least knows Moby-Dick's reputation as a Great Book. But Pierre is forgotten for the most part, or if remembered, it's labeled at best a noble failure. (Even Hershel Parker, a name so synonmous with Melville studies that I even imagine he looks like him, put out an edition with entire chapters excised for cohesiveness.) This criticism is not unfounded. If Moby-Dick is a glorious mess of a novel, four or five smaller books tossed together without caution, Pierre is just a mess. The language is purposely obfuscating, the plot is simultaneously horrifying and boring, and the book's organization is nonexistent. Parker reveals that Melville was midway into the novel when the Moby-Dick reviews started pouring in and claims that the savaging that book received essentially drove him nuts, at which point he inserted a bunch of incongruous material about Pierre's foundering career as a writer. Regardless of the reason, though, the book flat does not work as a novel.

Philosophically, on the other hand, it's interesting. It's my contention that Melville fashioned Pierre as a direct attack on Ralph Waldo Emerson, certainly the most prominent American intellectual of the time. Emerson, in his early writings especially, was a consummate optimist; he clearly belives that mankind is essentially good and will eventually be close to perfect and that society is moving forward. Melville, to put it gingerly, does not share his sentiment.

I suspect much of this argument boils down to religious upbringing. Emreson was a Unitarian--ever the most liberal of the Protestant denominations--and so man can trust himself; he is not exactly fallen--more like confused--and Christ becomes the great Example rather than the Savior. Emerson's essays bleed with Unitarian thought, diluted though it is with Eastern Pantheism. Melville, on the other hand, was raised Presbyterian, that dour, dark, and fatalistic Calvinist sect that sees man as totally depraved and unable to help himself. This is not to say, mind you, that Melville was all that great of a Calvinist, particularly in terms of total depravity. He subscribes to the notion of the noble savage in Typee and Moby-Dick (always the least racist of the 19th-century authors, his most evil characters are always white), and Billy Budd is remarkably free from the taint of sin. But he believes in evil in a way that Emerson does not seem to--witness the sinister joy in the way the sailors disembowel whales or Claggart's horrifying obsession with Billy.

Emerson and Melville's argument may also have to do with a hermeneutic disagreement. Both men admired Plato, and I'm sure neither of them missed the discussions of depravity in Protagoras and Meno. Socrates does not believe that man has an evil streak; he does not knowingly or willingly do wrong:

Simonides was not so ignorant as to say that he praised all who did no evil voluntarily, as if there were any who did evil voluntarily. For myself I am fairly certain that no wise man believes anyone sins willingly or willingly perpetuates any evil or base action. They know very well that all evil or base action is involuntary. (Protagoras 345d, e)

Meno modifies his disbelief, however:

Isn't it clear then that this class, who don't recognize evils for what they are, don't desire evil but what they think is good, though in fact it is evil; those who through ignorance mistake bad things for good obviously desire the good. (77d, e)

Socrates says that man does not willingly desire evil. (I'd love to hear a conversation between him and Dostoevsky, whose Underground man desires both evil and unhappiness just because he can.) Instead, man desires the good but sometimes cannot differentiate between the two. I suspect both Emerson and Melville agree with this diagnosis; their difference lies in their opinions on man's capacity for differentiation.

In "Self-Reliance," Emerson famously expands Socrates' most famous maxim so it reads "Trust thyself":

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind . . . What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? My friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.

Emerson's pan(en)theism later contradicts this--if we all share an Oversoul, then doing as you please is ultimately following mankind as a whole--but no matter: "Follow your bliss" is a common enough theme in Emerson's work, and it is to this theme that I think Melville responds.

And so Pierre opens in medias res of the conflict between Emerson and Melville, with a glorious Emersonian paean to transcendent Nature:

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.

This sets up Pierre as an Emersonian hero, pure and innocent and ready to commune with God and Nature. But the plot of the book subverts Emerson. Pierre's idyllic country life is shattered when he discovers that his saintly father sired an illegitimate daughter. For some bizarre reason, he decides the best course of action is to leave his angelic fiancee mere days before their wedding, pretend to have married his sister, and move to Greenwich Village. Disaster, as you might expect, ensues.

It's important here that Pierre clearly believes he's doing the right thing; all the pain he will suffer "seemed to him part of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue," and he even codes his actions as a search for God. He follows Emerson's advice here; he does what his heart tells him to do without worrying whether his heart belongs to God or to the devil. But his actions bring ignominy both to him and his family--I won't give away any specific details, but suffice it to say that everyone's life is ruined. He's picked the dumbest of all possible options, and what's more, he knows this on an intellectual level:

But this last distrust [of himself] was not of the heart; for heaven itself, so he felt, had sanctified that with its blessing; but it was the distrust of his intellect, which in undisciplinedly espousing the manly enthusiast cause of his heart, seemed to cast a reproach upon that cause itself.

Pierre (and his inspiration, Emerson) privileges emotion over reason, the heart over the head; he shares Socrates' apparent optimism regarding human nature but ignores Matthew Arnold's famous warning to "Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." And Melville punishes him dearly for it.

But, philosophically interesting as it may be, Pierre is a mess of a novel. It reminds me of a severe version of my problem with Walker Percy's fiction: he's a great philosopher with no talent for telling a story. Except that Melville could once tell a story, and he would be able to again. I'm not sure what kills Pierre as a novel--whether it's the negative reviews of Moby-Dick or whether it's the heaviness of the subject and the vitriol with which Melville approaches it--but I'm filing it under imperfect nonclassics.