In 1851, in correspondence to colleague and friend Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville said the following while still at work on the novel that would at first be panned by all critics and then later become the cornerstone of American literature, The Whale, better known as Moby Dick:
“In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now – I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass – growing mood in which a man ought always to compose – that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me….My dear sir, a presentiment is on me, I shall at last be worn out and perish….What I feel most moved to write, that is banned – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.” (McCall; Marx, 239)
It’s very clear on some level, that Melville felt he was doing something profound with Moby Dick that would have a lasting impact on his career. From the last segment of the above quote: “My dear sir, a presentiment is on me, I shall at last be worn out and perish”, a foreboding sense of almost professional doom is apparent.
Indeed, the feeling turned out to be prophetic; Moby Dick was released, and the critics were cool, the public apathetic (McCall; Marx, 239). However, Melville had discovered something in the creation of Moby Dick, and he refused to return to the type of writing that pleased readers earlier in his career, such as can be found in Typee and his travel narratives. He wrote another novel, St. Pierre, which also was not well received, (McCall; Marx, 239), before turning to short fiction and another well known story, Bartleby, The Scrivener.
What was it that so profoundly impacted Melville that he found himself unable to write with an eye towards commercial gain? He states in the above quote that what he “wants to write is banned – it will not pay”, but nevertheless, “write the other way, I cannot”. What he feels driven to explore: philosophical, metaphysical questions of meaning, existence, and the existential won’t earn him a dime, but he’s progressed too far to ever return to writing commercially appealing romances. Many critics have postulated Melville encountered something of an existential experience during the writing of Moby Dick forever altering his perception of the world around him and his own writing (McCall; Marx 246), and that he was simply unable to pull himself away from these themes.
First, looking at the existentialist symbolism present in Moby Dick is helpful in understanding where Melville was steering himself and his career – whether consciously or unconsciously. Writing itself, especially the process of writing fiction is a matter of extreme importance when it comes to existentialism and constructing meaning, simply because of all the weighted importance given to conveying meaning through either the written or spoken word, especially on a linguistic level. Existentialism itself is the philosophy that human existence is unexplainable, and that there are no absolute truths to discover behind language and meaning. There is nothing governing our actions, no fate, destiny, and we are free to make our own choices, because – according to existentialism – the only meaning that exists is that which is created by our own choices and actions (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1).
Writing fiction is especially important from an existentialist perspective, because narratives historically are mapping in nature, representing values and ideas intrinsic to the culture that created them. For example, classic novels like Robinson Crusoe and Kim are emblematic of this process: both novels, though excellent pieces of literature, are very overt expressions of colonial ideas and themes putting the white European in a confident position of dominance over all other lesser, “savage”, colonial beings.
So, where was Melville going with Moby Dick? What type of meaning was he trying to construct through his narrative – or was he not trying to construct meaning at all, but seeking to deconstruct all that we think about meaning. Jacques Derrida, European philosopher and theorist of the 1960’s, developed deconstruction as a process of interpreting meanings layered within text. According to deconstruction, within every text there are “inevitably points of equivocation and ‘undecidability’ that betray any stable meaning that an author might seek to impose upon his or her text” (Reynolds, 4). In other words, even as the author is working to convey a message or a theme, underlying elements work to contradict that theme and make any meaningful interpretation of the text suspect. In many circles, deconstruction is known humorously as the “theory that says nothing”, (Reynolds, 1).
It is important to understand the difference between the two schools of thoughts, and how they will be approached in this paper. Existentialism – the void of meaning, that there is no meaning except that which we make for ourselves – is expressed in several different parts of Moby Dick’s narrative, perhaps as an extension of the Melville’s own encounter with existentialism, or perhaps as a satiric comment on man’s seeming innate drive to conquer meaning, to understand the “non-understandable”. Deconstruction picks apart a narrative, and looks for areas where the author’s intended meaning is undermined through his own use of language, thus invalidating his own message, or pointing towards a different meaning and use of words other than what perhaps the author intended. In a limited fashion, deconstruction will be applied to different parts of Moby’s narrative, to see what meaning can be gleaned from Melville’s treatise on meaning – if there is indeed anything to find, although if there is one thing that critics and casual readers alike can agree on, there is something there in Moby Dick.
However, the use of contradicting language, the suspected unreliability or at least the unknown identity of Ishmael make it hard to understand just what that something is, for certain. If we apply some limited deconstruction to elements of Moby Dick, we come up with some inherent problems in the narrative’s attempt to construct meaning – if, at all, it is trying to do so. First of all, the narrator is a figure that readers implicitly place their trust in, especially when the novel is told from such a first person perspective as is Moby Dick. There is an unconscious trust readers place in the narrator that everything filtered through their point of view is accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
There are deliberate attempts to play upon this construction, of course, used very often in contemporary commercial fiction – an example coming most readily to mind is the first person narrative of Dr. Sheffield in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poroit mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the narrator himself turns out to be the perpetrator of the murder. However, in a novel such as this: a story making grand, sweeping statements about culture and religion, a reader must place their trust in the narrator, because if not, then what hope is there of construing the author’s true meaning from the work? The question arises about what Melville is truly saying, which is hard to pin down, because Ishmael is so hard to pin down as a narrator.
Perhaps this is part of the reason Moby Dick did not fare well during its time period, only becoming popular through the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, (ironically enough during the emergence of post-colonial and deconstructive thought), because readers instinctively found too much about Ishmael to be untrustworthy. Right from the very first line, we don’t even really know if this is his given birth name; he off-handedly instructs the reader, “Call me….Ishmael”, almost as if he’s picked the name out of a hat. We never really learn where Ishmael is from, all we know is that he’s a “simple sailor seeking the sea”, and he wants to go whaling – even though he admittedly knows nothing about whaling. There’s also some question of his race, especially considering he receives wages equal to what an African-American would’ve been given at the time, (Stafford, Lecture Notes 2006), and even his sexuality is in question with he and Quequeg’s bed-sharing antics.
Professor Eyal Peretz of Indiana University expresses this “facelessness” of Ishmael in a supremely accurate way:
“The opening thus says: either my name is Ishmael and you should call me by my name; or this is not my given name, but one called for by the conventions of fiction; or it is my name, carefully chosen, and in order to explain why I chose it I have to tell you my life’s story; or, since I am an abandoned human, and feel like a disowned son, I call upon you, the readers, to adopt me and call me by this name so that I won’t be alone any more.” (Dumm, 2).
Perhaps one of the more important aspects of Ishmael’s unreliability is the question of religious faith and beliefs, which would understandably be one of the reasons Melville confided in Hawthorne that he’d written a “very wicked book”, and was also a reason why the novel itself wasn’t well received. As early as chapter seven, The Chapel, Ishmael questions not only religious institution, but simply the very perception of faith and life after death:
“…there is death in this business of whaling – a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest air. Methinks my body is but the lees (dregs) of my better being” (Parker/Hayford; Melville, 45)
In this same passage, Ishmael also refers to faith as “a jackal” that “feeds among the tombs” (45).
According to deconstruction, we are to look for things undermining meaning in the narrative or character’s perspectives. This is tricky to do with Moby Dick, because it almost feels as if Melville purposefully undermined his own meaning, simply to portray the futility of meaning. We don’t have to look far for the inconsistency in Ishmael’s representation of faith, because although here in The Chapel he speaks as perhaps a casual agnostic, in Chapter 10 he speaks of himself as a “good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church”, (57), but then acts and thinks in a very Transcendental way as he validates Queequeg’s faith in relation to his own:
“But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth – pagans and all included – can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? (Queequeg’s idol) Impossible! But what is worship? – to do the will of God – that is worship. And what it is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me – that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolater. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; kissed his nose, and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with out consciences.” (57)
and then, after claiming himself to be a “good Christian”, gives his own indictment of Christians and their down fallings concerning other religions:
“…for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool…. we good Presbyterian Christians should be more charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects….
Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow cracked about the head, and sadly needed mending.”
However, notice for all of Ishmael’s transcendental-sounding exposition, he still uses the term pagan, and refers to himself turning into an “idolater” to accept Queequeg. Not only that, in the second above passage, he basically says he respects all religions, no matter how silly, (comical), and that we should think ourselves about other faiths because of their “half-crazy conceits on these subjects”. That doesn’t seem to fit with the Transcendentalist view of one “Oversoul” that all faiths partake in, so even here, according to deconstruction, something is working to undermine the “meaning” that we are all of one faith and God.
Is there a connection between Melville’s idea of a reliable narrator, and Ishmael’s idea of “true religion”, or what it means to be a “true Christian”, in this sense? Melville seems to have created this environment surrounding Ishmael that says “identity is not important; reliability is not relevant, nor is meaning: the only thing important is discovering that meaning for yourself, and what it means for you”.
Just the fact that Ishmael is a lone survivor of a sea disaster makes him suspect – there’s no one to corroborate his story. The question is, does that really matter; in Melville’s eyes, as well as the readers’? Melville obviously encountered something big in the writing of Moby Dick; so big it defied naming, and he had no way of giving it meaning. He knew that as a writer, that would be the death of him. He tried to create a narrator for whom the readers, identity and veracity of tale wouldn’t be important, but rather the experiential nature of his voyage was.
Perhaps Ishmael is Melville, to some extent, especially given not only his conflicting views concerning religion or faith – it’s all the same to Ishmael, and the spiritual “truth” is whatever seems to serve him best – but also his views of race as well. There is subtle contradiction here, rooted out by deconstruction of the text, especially in the language Ishmael uses. Despite Ishmael’s kind and favorable opinion of Queequeg, he still refers to him as a “savage” on numerous occasions, undermining this supposed “equality” that he portrays between them, even going so far as to refer to the harpoons-man as “George Washington cannibalistically developed” (55); in other words, yes, he’s very fine, sophisticated, and principled….for a savage, that is.
In another place, Ishmael speaks very warmly of his friend, but adds the disclaimer: “There was excellent blood in his veins – royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth” (59). Also, in Queequeg himself is a constructed contradiction: according to Ishmael, the harpoons-man left his native land to seek to “see more of Christendom” (59) for knowledge and wisdom – in essence, despite all his praise of the savage’s nature, he must still make him as someone who craves to be Christian – but is eventually disappointed to find that all Christians are just as bad as everyone else. In fact, Queequeg is worried that his time among the Christian’s has tainted him, making him unworthy of his own pagan birthright (60).
Deconstruction would tell us that despite Ishmael’s profound and eloquent speeches about the value of Queequeg, he’s really still a racist at heart because of the undermining language he uses to describe his harpooner friend. However, perhaps this is more of Melville playing with existentialism – what real meaning do those words have, especially when Queequeg and Ishmael have been so tightly bonded?
There are several passages that speak strongly to this connection between them, so it’s intriguing to consider: does Ishmael’s consistent use of the word “savage” and casual references to the blood in Queequeg’s veins undermine his attempt to be open minded and transcendental, or, as existentialism says, do these words simply have no meaning of their own, especially in the face of experiential occurrences between these two characters?
Consider this passage in Chapter 47, as they weave a mat together:
“….that it seemed as if 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…..
Meantime, 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 contrast 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. (179)
The above passage is loaded, from both an existentialist perspective, as well as a deconstructive. All in one passage we have an “indifferent sword”, “fixed threads”, “ever returning, unchanging vibration”. The thrusts of Queequeg’s “indifferent sword” are “impulsive”, hitting the woof sometimes “slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly”, working side-by-side with chance and free will….all “interweavingly working together”. This passage could speak of many things – that existence is a mystery that cannot be divined; order, chaos, harmony, randomness all work together in some concert that cannot be understood or made to fit into any one meaning. It could also be seen as the reaction of someone faced with the horror of meaningless – as Ishmael faces in the whale – and what they do to survive: they make their own meaning out of the seeming random meaninglessness. Perhaps here, in defense of his psyche, defending his own construct of meaning, Ishmael is constructing something with Queequeg that has meaning in the weaving of the loom.
So is this then a novel about survival – about surviving the discovery that there is no hidden meaning “behind the veil”, so to speak, and the measures one takes to survive in such a world? Evidence of the above text in the weaving passage speaks strongly to support this, along with one other fact of the narrative: Ishmael is the only one to return to tell his tale – he survives, whereas everyone else does not. In fact, the closing epilogue plays off the idea that not only has Ishmael survived, he was destined or fated – ironically enough, in the middle of all these “no meaning, no controlling fate” themes – to survive because of a last minute change in his position aboard the Peqoud:
“The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? – Because one did survive the wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s browsman…” (427)
And of course, ironically enough, Ishmael is saved by something than thatcan considered emblematic of shifting meaning itself: the canoe, box, footstool, coffin of Queequeg, which bursts out of the water at the last possible instant for Ishmael to catch hold off. Also, there is irony – perhaps divinely so – that the ship looking for one of it’s lost crewman, the one Ahab turned away in his zeal to find the white whale, is what comes to Ishmael’s rescue, “retracing her search after her missing children, only (finding) another orphan” (427).
