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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sat Apr 19, 2003 9:07 am

Subject: Metaphysical Meaning in Melville's "Moby Dick"

This is the first half of my post (in this email), to see entire
post, please visit Sulekha at:

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=55852

Metaphysical Meaning in Melville's "Moby Dick"

"..every man in turn mirrors back his own mysterious self".

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/Moby.htm

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/Mdtitles.htm#religion

(various excerpts from various urls):

The meaning of the title Moby Dick is very complex. ... The meaning of
the name Moby Dick lies not in the book itself, but in the reader

We search for absolute meaning in the universe, but there may be only
ultimate meanings and that one of these meanings is that there are no
absolutes

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

In that universe he has learned, as man must if he is to live in his
world, the lesson of acceptance. The mixed good and evil in all
things, the prevalence of suffering in the world, the horror in which
at times the universe seems formed--these he has come to take without
fright and without affront.

Melville makes the reader constantly question what we think we see.
He 'barbs' collective America with the singular Queequeg (the other).
Queequeg, by his willingness to make the ultimate 'Christian'
sacrifice and lay down his life for his fellow man, begs the
question: is "unconsciousness"/selflessness and instinct/quality
stronger in a 'savage' pagan than a 'civilized' Christian? Here,
Melville has one hand on the bible and the other on his typological
joke book - a double-take device he employs throughout Moby-Dick.

Starbuck, the first mate, sees everything opposite of the Captain. He
thinks that the reason God put him on this earth was to kill whales
for profit. When Ahab turns the boat in a different direction before
they have killed as many whales as possible in the large herd,
Starbuck thinks this is a very stupid idea. More than once, Starbuck
has attempted to kill Ahab. Although he never follows through, he is
against Ahab's madness, but yet helpless. Starbuck represents all of
the Puritan ideals of work ethic, preordination and Divine Providence.

Queequeg saves Ishmael's life a few times and also has done some
baptizing. When he signs the contract of the Pequod, he signs with a
fish, which is a symbol made in the sand as a sign of believing in
Christ during the Roman persecution of Christians. Queequeg throws
fish bones to foresee the future. He goes into a state where he does
not eat, speak, or move. A few members of the crew try and kill him
with their knives when Ishmael attempts to save him. The men are
stronger than Ishmael and so Queequeg ends up saving Ishmael, instead
of vice versa. Queequeg had requested that the chief's feather be
carved in his coffin. The symbol is actually made up of three
feathers; three is a very symbolic number in the Bible. It represents
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The coffin is what ends up
saving Ishmael, once again. The whale to Queequeg is nature or God.
It is very symbolic in his eyes. Because of baptism, salvation and
sacrifice, Queequeg could very well be a Christ figure.

Stubb is the second mate. He tells Ishmael that he understands the
power of the whale. He is very carefree and foolish. In the movie,
Stubb says, "A laugh is the best way to deal with strange things in
life." He joked about everything. He also told Ishmael that if God
had to be a fish it would be a whale. Stubb "tries to see everything
in a favorable light." While Ishmael represents Everyman in this
allegory, it is Stubb who represents all men, the majority of whom
are simply trying to "get by" and have as good a time as the

========================

Sitaram comments: Here is a MOST worthwhile url to visit

http://www.pathguy.com/mobydick.htm

The New England Transcendentalists offered philosophic and
metaphysical ideas without any overriding system or dogma. And here
is the key. Moby Dick differs from other books, particularly from its
time, in offering a host of different perspectives without any single
moral. Moby Dick is about different points of view.

The philosophical ramblings in Moby Dick cover a huge range of
perspectives. Collegians focused on minority group grievances will
find both old ideas about the superiority of the white race bringing
learning and technology to the rest of the world, and descriptions of
physically and spiritually superior people of color. Melville is
obviously thrilled by the dangerous adventure of killing whales. But
people who are troubled by the cruelty of whaling, then and now, and
who are concerned about the humane treatment of animals, will be
surprised by Melville's horror of slaughterhouses and meat-eating.
People who have different attitudes about orthodox Christianity will
see Starbuck as a self-sacrificing saint or a superstitious fool. You
will find dozens of additional examples of the different,
contradictory perspectives which Melville shares. Each can be the
basis for a fine term paper. But true to the central theme of Moby
Dick, Melville never tells us which perspective we should decide
is "the correct one".

The theme of different points of view pervades the novel. Ishmael
leaves the land and the ordinary thinking of a schoolteacher to
voyage on the ocean, which for Melville holds the great mystery, from
which the mind can never return (ch. 53). A bench becomes a bed. A
ship's forecastle is a pulpit. A shark's fin is the gnomon of a
sundial (ch. 32). A whaleboat becomes a pastry for the whale to
enjoy. A coffin is a canoe is a chest is a lifebuoy. Three men
looking at the same gold coin see three entirely different things
(ch. 99). Nine gams each provide a different view of Moby Dick. The
whale has its eyes on opposite sides of its head, so it sees two
entirely different views of the universe at the same time
("contrasted view" -- ch. 74). Father Mapple tells the faithful
that "if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves" -- we must learn to
see things in other ways. You will enjoy finding hundreds of other
examples.

Ahab destroys himself and his ship and crew because he cannot give up
the quest, even though he knows it is crazy. Starbuck, the pacifist
Quaker, cannot kill Ahab, even though he knows it is the way to save
the lives of the crew. Stubb sees only fun, and Flask sees only his
own interests. As in many ship novels, the "Pequod" is a microcosm of
the human race, each member having a point of view that isolates him
from others and from a full view of the world. Only Ishmael, who has
always tried to see the other person's point of view, survives.
Some of your literature instructors may be postmodernists
<postmod.htm>, who say that all perspectives are equally valid, and
that truth is whatever your grievance-group says it is. We hear
nowadays that people cannot really understand each other across
racial, gender, or cultural lines.

What I like best about Moby Dick is the under-theme of friendship and
understanding. Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg is the story of a
white American coming to understand and love a man from a different
culture, to be open to his religion and customs, and to find a common
human experience underneath the differences. For Melville, humanity's
hope is that we CAN come to understand and love each other in the
midst of conflicting points of view.

A social liberal might see Melville's description as a courageous and
enlightened treatment of the forbidden subject of homosexuality. A
social conservative might see Melville offering a model of chaste
friendship as an alternative to sex between shipmates, which must
have been common, if hidden

==============

http://www.melville.org/mobyname.htm

The Origin of the Name "Moby Dick"
The name of Melville's most famous creation was suggested by an
article by Jeremiah Reynolds, published in the New York Knickerbocker
Magazine in May 1839. Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific
recounted the capture of a giant white sperm whale that had become
infamous among whalers for its violent attacks on ships and their
crews. The meaning of the name itself is quite simple: the whale was
often sighted in the vicinity of the island of Mocha, and "Dick" was
merely a generic name like "Jack" or "Tom" -- names of other deadly
whales cited by Melville in Chapter 45 of Moby-Dick::

"But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
celebrity -- nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was
he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after
death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and
distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or
Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Jack! thou famed leviathan, scarred
like an iceberg, who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of
that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?
Was it not so, O New Zealand Tom! thou terror of all cruisers that
crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not
so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times
assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it
not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise
with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are
four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as
Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar."

The transformation of "Mocha" to "Moby", however, presents a greater
mystery. Melville himself never explained the origin of the latter
word. Did he invent it on a whim and like the way it sounded? Or is
it some strange piece of hermetic Melvillean arcana? The answer will
probably never be known, but a number of scholars have amused
themselves by taking shots at it. Following as an example is a
conjecture put forth by Harold Beaver in his "Commentary" on the
Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick (1972):

"By July 1846 even the Knickerbocker Magazine had forgotten its
earlier version [of Reynold's article], reminding its readers of 'the
sketch of "Mocha Dick, of the Pacific", published in the
Knickerbocker many years ago...'. That account may well have led
Melville to look up the earlier issue, in the very month he
rediscovered his lost buddy of the Acushnet and fellow deserter on
the Marquesas, Richard Tobias Greene, and began 'The Story of Toby'
[the sequel to Typee]. May not 'Toby Dick' then have elided
with 'Mocha Dick' to form that one euphonious compound, 'Moby Dick'?"

===============

http://www.americanliterature.com/MD/MD70.HTML

Moby Dick - CHAPTER 70

The Sphynx

It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.

Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a
neck; on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there,
in that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that
the surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet
intervening between him and his subject, and that subject almost
hidden in a discolored, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and
bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward
circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that
subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into
the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skillfully steer clear
of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a
critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not
marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to
behead a sperm whale?

When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a
cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small
whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with
a full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head
embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to
suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a
whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn
in jewellers' scales.

The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head
was hoisted against the ship's side- about half way out of the sea,
so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native
element. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over it,
by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and
every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves;
there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the
giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.

When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but
now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow
lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves
upon the sea.

A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone
from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to
gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took
Stubb's long spade still remaining there after the whale's
decapitation and striking it into the lower part of the half-
suspended mass, placed its other end crutchwise under one arm, and so
stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.

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 has 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 on matter, but has its cunning
duplicate in mind."

===========

http://lonestar.texas.net/~mseifert/final.html

In Moby Dick, if Ahab is searching for absolute meaning in the
universe, Ishmael discovers that there may be only ultimate meanings
and that one of these meanings is that there are no absolutes. Ahab's
search is tragic while Ishmael's is a journey, not unlike that of
Dante in The Divine Comedy. Trace the journeys of both of these men,
and be specific in terms of the episodes in the novel which reveal
these actions. You will find our notes on "Moby Dick and the Book of
Job" by C. Hugh Holman very helpful.
The influence of Job is pervasive and controlling, basic and
thematic, the most informing single principle of the book's
composition.

To Melville, who has 47 verses in Job marked or annotated, and all of
them dealing with the darkness of life, the inscrutability of god,
the desire for self-justification, or the mighty attributes of
Leviathan, the Book was apparently an elemental poetic drama of a
just man unjustly suffering, flinging indignantly aside the simple
answers of his would-be comforters, and demanding a hearing and an
accountability before his God, finally to be overwhelmed into awed
acceptance when that God spoke through a whirlwind and pointed to the
vastness and inscrutability of His created universe as proof that His
ways are beyond knowing, pointing particularly to Leviathan of the
deep as the most impressive and the vastest of His created things.
This tormented, patriarchal Job, living in the dawn of religious
thought, had no assurance of immortality. Melville marked three times
the fourteenth chapter in which Job asks his dark question about a
future life: "But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea man giveth up the
ghost, and where is he?" He also marked the ninth verse of the
despairing seventh chapter: "As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth
away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more."

Melville seems to have been speaking much for himself when he praised
the author of the Mosses for having a "touch of Puritanic gloom," and
said: "this great power of blackness in him derives its force from
its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original
Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply
thinking mind is always and wholly free."

Melville owed the Book of Job for the central fact and symbol of his
novel, the great white whale, Moby Dick. Beginning with the 38th
Chapter of Job, God answers Job out of the whirlwind. The answer
consists of a linked chain of questions, the object of which is to
teach Job humility by making him comprehend that God's power and
majesty are unknowable. Beginning, "Where wast thou when I laid the
foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding," God
moves from the creation, "when the morning stars sang together,"
through the marvels of inanimate nature to those of animate nature--
the mountain goat, the wild ass, the wild ox, the ostrich, the horse,
the hawk, and in the 40th chapter, Behemoth, the greatest land
creature. Chapter 41 continues this taunting questioning, centering
it around the symbol of Leviathan, the greatest of all creatures,
described in terms of his physical strength and destructive might.
God concludes, "Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without
fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the
children of pride." Job, one of those children of pride, declares, "I
uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I
knew not," and although his own suffering has not lessened nor the
riddle of evil in his world been answered, he rests, apparently with
God's blessing, on an acceptance of the intermingled good and evil of
his world. It was to these last chapters that Melville was indebted
for the primary symbolic value of Moby Dick.

THE LITERAL WHALE REMAINS A PORTION OF THE SOLID BEDROCK ON WHICH
MOBY DICK RESTS; BUT HE IS ALSO TRANSFORMED INTO THE ENCOMPASSING
METAPHOR AND THE CENTRAL IMAGE FOR WHATEVER MEANING THE BOOK HAS.

The principal agent in effecting this transformation is the narrator-
hero Ishmael; for it is the play of mind, wit, of word, and of
feeling that invests the comparatively simple action of the plot and
the large masses of factual data in the cetological chapters with
depth and meaning.

Ahab is Shakespearean tragedy, Ishmael is "Divine Comedy"--journey.

From Whale Fact to Whale Symbol, Ishmael accomplishes this through
symbolic language.

Ishmael sees the terrors of the whale universe: see earlier chapters
on his comments of pictures of whales and whale fossils.

"Here then, was this grey-headed ungodly old man, chasing with curses
a Job's whale around the world." Yet Ishmael sees not only the
terrors but also the wonders of this vast creature. The quantities of
his dark and light (and by implication truth) that he provides for
man, the ivory he yields, the vastness of the industry he supports,
the extent to which he has made New England men masters of the seas--
these beneficent aspects of the whale are always before us. And other
and calmer attributes of Leviathan are suggested. When Moby Dick is
at last sighted, Ishmael exclaims: "A gentle joyousness--a mighty
mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the
white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his
graceful horns...did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
divinely swan."

REPOSE IN SWIFTNESS=fundamental ambiguity towards the whale.

The quality of REPOSE often becomes serenity for Ishmael. As he
squeezes the sperm (case), that is kneads sperm oil to prevent its
coagulating, he says, "I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan
superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of
anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-
will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever." He imagines
that devoutness is a characteristic of the whale, saying, :I once saw
a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and
for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes....I then
testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all
beings."

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS A M B I G U O U S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE WHALE
IS DEVELOPED STEADILY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK.

At the beginning of the novel Ishmael says that he "could see naught
in that brute but the deadliest ill." Yet when he sees the great
white whale, he exclaims:

And what was Moby Dick to Ishmael? At the beginning of the "Whiteness
of the Whale" chapter, he says, "What the White Whale was to Ahab,
has been hinted; what at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid."
It is not only in this chapter that Ishmael defines the whale for
himself; it is in the entire novel. Early in the voyage he,
says, "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine." But this was a position
in which he did not rest. His immense quality of wonder, his ability
to look questioningly, his unwillingness to accept answers as final,
enabled him to see Moby Dick not as evil or as good, but as
the "interlinked terrors and wonders of God."

Ishmael's problem was RECONCILIATION TO THE NATURE OF HIS WORLD. The
novel had opened when, in his own words, his "hypos" had got
an "upper hand" on him and it required "a strong moral principle to
prevent [him] from deliberately stepping into the street and
methodically knocking people's hats off." Queequeg, the cannibal
harpooner, gives his the first lesson in acceptance, and he doubles
his world by pledging eternal friendship with this heathen seller of
shrunken heads. Early in the novel he is able to see this bond to
Queequeg, symbolically represented by "the monkey rope," and to
say, "I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was
now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had
received a moral wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune
might plunge me into unmerited disaster and death." See also chapter
10. While squeezing case, he also has what is almost a mystical
experience..."that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at
least shift, his concept of attainable felicity; not placing it
anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart,
the bid, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that
I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally."

The climax of the voyage for, and the intellectual climax of the
novel, occurs when Ishmael, steering the boat, gazes too long into
the red flames of the try-pot fires (flames that are by then
established as symbols of Ahab's madness) and turns himself around,
so that recovering himself, he cannot see the compass. "Nothing
seemed before me but a jet gloom now and then made ghastly by flashes
of redness," he says. "Uppermost was the impression, that whatever
swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven
ahead as rushing from all havens astern." Then, realizing that he has
been turned around, he rights himself just in time to keep the vessel
from capsizing. "How glad and how grateful," he exclaims, "the relief
from this unnatural hallucination of the night." Ishmael is going
through his BAPTISM OF FIRE. Out of the experience he brings his
redeeming knowledge, and he cries:

"Look not too long in the face of fire, O man! Turn not thy back to
the compass...believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes
all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will
be bright.... Nevertheless the sun hides not the ocean, which is the
dark side of this earth, and which is two third of this earth....The
truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books
is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe....
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee;
as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there
is a woe that is madness."

That last sentence defines a portion of the thematic organization of
the book. "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is
madness." For much of the book is ordered around the idea of a woe
that is madness. Ahab is the "mad old man," whose woe has driven him
to catastrophic insanity; he is, as he declares, "madness maddened."
It is the titanic fury of his insane rage that so compellingly
envelops us that we, like Ishmael, are momentarily blinded by the red
flames. The outgrowth of Ishmael's being the only survivor "buoyed up
by [a] coffin...floated on a soft and dirgelike main" was not madness
for Ishmael; it was wisdom--the wisdom of Job, as bodied forth in the
Leviathan and in Moby Dick.

The unique salvation of Ishmael is essential to the theme of the
novel. He alone of those on the Pequod has faced with courage of
humility the facts of his universe; he alone has learned to know woe
without becoming mad. There is no necessity that Ishmael live in the
action and plot of the novel; there is necessity that he survive
inherent in the moral order of the universe in which Melville puts
him--the primitive, pre-Christian universe of Job. In that universe
he has learned, as man must if he is to live in his world, the lesson
of acceptance. The mixed good and evil in all things, the prevalence
of suffering in the world, the horror in which at times the universe
seems formed--these he has come to take without fright and without
affront. He tells us, "Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to
perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would they let
me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates
of the place one lodges in." He has discovered how, "amid the
tornadoes Atlantic of [his] being...for ever centrally [to] disport
in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve
around [him]," to meet that woe without madness, and "deep down and
deep inland still [to] bathe [him] in eternal mildness of joy." As it
had neither for him has the riddle of evil and suffering found
answer. HE HAS DISCOVERED A CENTER OF CALM AND REPOSE WITHIN HIMSELF,
BUT IS A CALM THAT KNOWS, AS HE SAYS, "THOUGH IN MANY OF ITS ASPECTS
THIS VISIBLE WORLD SEEMS FORMED IN LOVE, THE INVISIBLE SPHERES WERE
FORMED IN FRIGHT." Like Job, Ishmael has rebelled against the order
of the universe; like Job, too, a vast inscrutable symbol of
incomprehensible reality has loomed before him in the form of a great
whale. And like Job, Ishmael has learned that, though in this darkly
imperfect world wisdom is woe, still man must learn to avoid the woe
that is madness. He knows that there is no alternative to shouldering
the burden of this ambiguous and affrighting world.

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