Pursuing the Whale from Quarantine, part 6

Remember Ahab's strange liturgy--his unholy communion and binding oath and little lower layers. Ishmael reminds us of them, and tells us where he was and what he was doing during them: "I, ISHMAEL, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs" (Chapter 41).

Oh, Ishmael, what have you done?

Chapter 41, Moby Dick

Finally we meet the novel's title character: Moby Dick himself. There are lots of rumors about this deadly and massive white whale. They are all rumors that, in my reading, encourage us to see him as more than just a large and dangerous animal, but as a complex symbol of the knowledge beyond humanity's grasp: most directly knowledge of why evil befalls us in this world, but also more abstractly a god-like knowledge of how everything works together and god-like control over what happens. Like I said, it's a complex symbol that is hard to put exactly into words, so we can just call it The Whale. Perhaps it is intentionally irreducible to a clear concept or statement, and maybe we're just supposed feel its enormous power and grandeur and inscrutability.

Well now, Mr. Forshey, (you might say if you're reading critically--and good for you!), it's a neat trick to say The Whale symbolizes this complex thing that's just too difficult to put into words. Neat trick indeed. But you're always telling us to be more precise and find evidence from the text.

Fair enough! I have two passages from this chapter to support my reading. First, notice the two attributes that rumor has attached to Moby Dick. Some sailors had adopted "the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time" (Chapter 41). Ubiquitous means "present everywhere." And "some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal." Like Hawthorne, Melville uses rumor and superstition to shade our interpretation of events. This whale, we are supposed to think, might just have God-like attributes: omnipresence and immortality. It might just be divine.

Second, there is this gorgeous passage where Ishmael describes how Ahab saw The Whale:

Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them ... All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Wow. Hang on, I just have to read it again.

Wow. It's just such beautiful and powerful prose. I'm awestruck by it.

Ahab sees The White Whale as the "incarnation" (that is, embodiment) of "all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations ... all that most maddens and torments ... all truth with malice in it." That's why, contra my buddy Ron Swanson, I see The Whale as a symbol for the knowledge that is beyond humanity's ken, and for the control that goes along with that knowledge.

That interpretation also plays nicely with all those many (so many) long passages ahead of us that will describe in (excruciating) detail every facet of a sperm whale's anatomy, only to insist again and again that we really can't be sure about anything concerning this profound (Latin, profundus, deep--both literally and figuratively) creature.

All that said, I am always happy to hear and entertain other interpretations. Just: be as precise as you can and find evidence from the text!