This time I picked up an old paperback version from Everyman Press at Keynote Used Records & Books in South Lake Tahoe, California. I was there on vacation with my family and I remember my daughter asking me why I was going to read it for the seventh time and whether or not she should read it.
As to my reasons why, I told her about my frustrating experience with Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick?, a slim little tome in which the author, I thought, entirely missed the point. To Philbrick, the reason we keep reading Moby-Dick is because it is a great adventure story, realistically told. He goes out of his way to declare that the White Whale is NOT a symbol for anything else.
As I said in my post on Why Read Moby-Dick?
The White Whale IS a symbol. In fact, it is baffling to me that Philbrick could possibly say that it is not. The fundamental reason we continue to read Moby-Dick is not because it is a good adventure story, realistically told. We read it because it is BOTH an adventure story, realistically told, AND it is a symbolic quest for an understanding of man’s place in the cosmos.
And…
It is the blending of the adventure story with the symbols that makes Moby-Dick worth reading. The whole book, from start to finish, is a master class in this technique -- using the characters and plot to advance not just a story, but an exploration of symbolic and existential meaning. There, in fact, may be no finer example of this in all of literature. THAT is why I keep reading Moby-Dick.
My brush with Philbrick clearly got my hackles up, and it whetted my appetite to again dive into a novel I had said last time I didn’t think I would ever take the time to read again. Perhaps, like Ishmael deciding to go to sea in the opening chapter, Moby-Dick is the tonic I best need to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.
And how satisfying was it to find the following excerpts in a section at the very end of my new used copy on the critical reception that Moby-Dick received at its time of publication?
Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life. Certain it is that the rapid, pointed hints which are often thrown out, with the keenness and velocity of a harpoon, penetrate deep into the heart of things, showing that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.
And…
But Moby-Dick, admirable as it is as a narrative of maritime adventure, is far more than that; it is, fundamentally, a parable of the mystery of evil and the accidental malice of the universe. The white whale stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, overpowering, while Ahab is the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive, that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against the blank senselessness of power.
Take that Philbrick!
As to whether or not my daughter should also read Moby-Dick, I told her, like I tell most people: life is far simpler if you don’t.
The Approach
But if I was going to dive beneath these waves again, I felt I needed a new kind of approach to the text -- something new to look for and think about. Otherwise, I knew I would find myself simply rushing forward to find my favorite excerpts. Thankfully, I found this new approach while reading the comprehensive introduction offered by Professor A. Robert Lee.
…Melville built Moby-Dick at a variety of interwoven and mutually reflective levels. Much as it tells of the gladiatorial combat of man against beast, or of a nineteenth-century American capitalist industry, his story also itself resembles ‘a Job’s whale’ whose inner meanings he took the most considerable pains to mask. To understand the enclosing design, the architecture of his ‘mighty theme,’ requires the reader’s patience and flexibility, no expectation of a single, mastering interpretation.
No single mastering interpretation. According to Lee, Melville reinforces this ‘mighty theme’ by constantly presenting facts and items in the story that are either open to multiple interpretations or which simply defy any kind of interpretation at all. Through this technique, the pre-ordained truth of Moby-Dick is as hidden from the reader as all the pre-ordained truths about whales and whaling are from the humble crew of the Pequod.
This, then, became my primary approach to this seventh reading of Moby-Dick.
A Sort of Indefinite, Half-Attained, Unimaginable Sublimity
And Lee is right. Once you start looking for them, these “items” with no fixed meaning or interpretation are everywhere.
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -- It’s a blasted heath. -- It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. -- It’s the breaking up of the ice-bound stream of time. But 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 stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great leviathan himself?
This is Chapter 3. Ishmael is looking at the painting above and behind the bar in The Spouter-Inn. And already Melville is giving you these hints to his mighty theme. What is this thing? What does it mean? The questions are not just for the painting, of course, but for the whale. And for the novel.
His Own Inexorable Self
In Chapter 9 Father Mapple preaches The Sermon, choosing as his text the story of Jonah and the whale. And as he concludes the lessons we shipmates are to derive from it, he says:
‘But oh! Shipmates! On the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, -- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath -- O Father! -- chiefly known to me by Thy rod -- mortal and immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?’
It is a bit of a muddled mess, but importantly it is an interpretation, a way of looking at the world around you. By my reading it is a bit of a blend, and perhaps a foreshadow of the coming clash between the Christian Starbuck and the Individualistic Ahab. Whether or not your feet are planted firmly on the Keel laid down by God, going forward into the world as your own inexorable self seems like the best way to delight and understanding.
Didn’t the People Laugh?
In Chapter 13, Ishmael struggles with a Wheelbarrow, and Queequeg tells a story.
Shifting the barrow from my hands to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing -- though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow -- Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?’
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Kokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Kokovoko, and its commander -- from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain -- this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said, -- for those people have their grace as well as we -- though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts -- Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself -- being Captain of a ship -- as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house -- the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl; -- taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. ‘Now,’ said Queequeg, ‘what you tink now? -- Didn’t our people laugh?’
Melville is playing with meaning and custom here. The same thing -- wheelbarrows or punchbowls -- meaning different things in different contexts. Some frivolous and some serious.
Not Sick and Not Well
Quick one here. In Chapter 16, The Ship, Ishmael finds and is accepted as a member of the Pequod crew, but persists in asking about its infamous Captain.
‘And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art shipped.’
‘Yes, but I should like to see him.’
‘But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either.’
Delicious. Ahab is not sick. But he is not well, either. What is he? How are we supposed to know?
The Transition
On this read through Moby-Dick, it became abundantly clear to me that Chapter 24, The Advocate, is where the transition happens. Chapters 1-23 are, more or less, an allegorized story, where the forward momentum is the story, accentuated with allegorical elements. But starting with Chapter 24, as the Pequod ventures out into the open sea, things switch from an allegorized story to a storied allegory, where the forward momentum in the allegory, accentuated with storied elements. In a way, these are dangerous waters, and it is where many readers find themselves lost, as everything one tries to cling to as slick with multiple allegorical meanings.
The Unreasoning Mask
Glad this one from Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, aligns with my theme, since it is one of my favorite passages in the entire novel.
‘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.’
It is Ahab, talking to Starbuck, after Starbuck has chided him for seeking “vengeance on a dumb brute.” And here we can clearly see Ahab’s interpretation of the white whale as something much more, clearly separating the “unreasoning mask” that Starbuck sees from the “still reasoning thing” that exists behind it. Or does it? Even Ahab expresses some doubt in this passage, admitting that he is seeing through a glass darkly. But either way -- “be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal” -- Ahab will strike, strike out at what, as Father Mapple would say, his inexorable self sees and hates.
A Vacated Thing
Chapter 44, The Chart, follows Ahab down into his cabin after a squall, where he often sleeps the sleep of the tormented.
Often, when forced from his hammock, by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the vert creature he creates.
This is a great example of a passage I’ve now clearly read seven times, but never before remarked or even paused to reflect on it. Like a lot of Melville’s prose, it is dense and hard to penetrate, but it seems to be describing Ahab as Ahab has just described the white whale, as a unreasoning mask -- a vacated thing -- behind which is a “living principle or soul” that animates him and drives him ruthlessly in his quest against the white whale.
Should I choose to read Moby-Dick for an eighth time, this may be an interesting approach to take to that reading. Where is Ahab agent and where is Ahab principal? It calls to mind the scene in The Symphony where Ahab reminisces about his youth and Starbuck sees through the pasteboard mask and is moved to deep emotion. But even on that scene -- is that Ahab agent or is that Ahab principal?
All Interweavingly Working Together
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still all subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor resolves into his own invisible self.
Chapter 47, The Mat-Maker, is a devilish chapter.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the thread, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as of this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meanwhile, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrats in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance -- aye, chance, free will, and necessity -- no wise incompatible -- all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course -- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at event.
Here are necessity, free will, and chance -- all working independently and in constrained concert with each other -- producing both actual fabric and the ultimate metaphor of existence. Or at least man’s view of it and his place within it.
And, then, the chapter shifts.
Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in the air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
The shadows of Fate -- with wild cries announcing their coming.
‘There she blows! There! There! There! She blows! She blows!’
‘Where-away?’
‘On the lee-beam, about two miles off! A school of them!’
Instantly all was commotion.
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.
‘There go flukes!’ was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.
‘Quick, steward!’ cried Ahab. ‘Time! Time!’
Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.
The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter -- this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers -- that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board on enemy’s ship.
And here, the free will of the men advancing forward towards the Fate of their necessity, haunted by the chance movements of the whales unseen and beneath the sea. In this short chapter, Melville first weaves his metaphor of fate, chance, and free will, each working together to create reality, and then he shows the same action in the plot and action of the story.
Devilish.
Any Way You Look At It
In Chapter 55, Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales, Ishmael tries to give an accurate depiction of the whale as he is seen in the sea by whalemen; bemoaning so many of the inaccurate descriptions that populate our minds and documents. He concludes:
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
The whale itself -- forever undescribed and open to interpretation.
Its Cunning Duplicate in Mind
In Chapter 70, The Sphynx, Ishmael (and Ahab) contemplate on the severed head of the Sperm Whale.
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muttered Ahab, ‘which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! Thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!’
‘Sail ho!’ cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
‘Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,’ cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. ‘That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. -- Where away?’
‘Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!’
“Better and better, man. Would now St Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.’
There are so many chapters like this in Moby-Dick. Melville famously dissects the whale in these chapters, looking at every piece and part of the whale -- and each of them, like its black and hooded head, is an allegory for the philosophical mind to cogitate on and interpret as it sees fit. Like the Sphynx, it will never reveal its own secrets.
Read It If You Can
Chapter 79, The Prairie, is another example, this time looking at the broad and featureless “forehead” of the Sperm Whale.
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. Is it moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
Read it if you can. It is unreadable, open to any interpretation that you might wish to give it -- or perhaps, in its expansiveness, imperious to interpretation entirely.
But An Empty Cipher
The gold doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast -- a reward to he who should first raise the White Whale -- is perhaps the clearest example of this narrative technique that allows for everything, literally everything, to be open to interpretation.
In Chapter 99, The Doubloon seems to beguile even Ahab, who looks at it in an attempt to decipher its true meaning.
But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
For, of course, some certain significance lurks in all things -- but what is that significance, and can we ever know it for sure? One by one, Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, each look upon the doubloon and interpret what its markings might mean -- for them if not for the world entire.
On its round border it bore the letters, REPĂBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on a third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point in Libra.
In these figures Ahab sees the representation of his own quest against the White Whale, and the fortitude that one like himself must master if he is to be successful in that objective. But in them Starbuck sees the protection and benevolence of God, and Stubb sees all the things he can buy with the coin, and Flask sees nothing at all.
Which is the true interpretation? Is there one?
Some Invisible Power
And finally, with my approach to this seventh reading in mind, that Melville is purposely presenting character, plot and metaphor as things forever open to interpretation with no single meaning, it is, wonderfully, that iconic passage in Chapter 132, The Symphony, that now increases in its importance and indeliability.
‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all this time, lo! That smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!’
What is it, indeed? Melville is not going to tell you. You’ll have to come up with your own interpretation.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
