Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)

Traditionally Moby Dick has been interpreted as a Christian narrative, sanitized like Paradise Lost by claiming that the white whale is the mystery of nature, or God, and that those who seek to discover forbidden knowledge will be righteously destroyed. But Melville, in a letter to Hawthorne, writes “I have written a wicked book. . . and feel spotless as a lamb.” He offers to

Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked—though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one),—

Ego non baptiso te in nomine—but make out the rest yourself. (qtd. in Dreyfus 144)

The Latin passage referred to, the “secret motto”, is most likely Ego non baptiso te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti—sed in nomine Diaboli: “I baptize you not in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” it says, “but rather in the name of the Devil.”

Moby Dick revolves around Captain Ahab, who seeks vengeance against the whale for a past injury. While the other crewmates are superstitious, Ahab is self-reliant and determined.

Henry A. Murray claims, “Melville’s Satan is the spitting image of Milton’s hero … the stricken, passionate, indignant, and often eloquent rebel angel of Paradise Lost, whose role is played by Ahab” (qtd. in Dreyfus 160). For conservative readers who prefer the orthodox interpretation of Satan, however, Captain Ahab damns himself by his megalomania and hubris.

In Failure and Success in America, Martha Banta reads Ahab more in line with

Kierkegaard’s description of anxiety in the face of the abyss, but with a unique twist: the absence of meaning lures Ahab into action via an imaginary limit; as does his crews submission:

Ahab’s weight of egomania paradoxically springs from his idea about the possible vacancy of meaning behind the white brow of the whale and the universe – a vacuum that would say no to the ego’s limitless expectations. His ego rushes in to fill the space left open by the crew’s submission of its individuality to his greater force. (143)

According to Hubert Dreyfus in All Things Shining, the moral of Moby Dick is that, “Either we become crazy at the recognition that there is no such truth, or we drive ourselves crazy trying to prove there is.” The authors muse that perhaps the purpose of life is to “lower the conceit of

attainable felicity” (182). But if Moby Dick was meant as a warning, why would he call it wicked?

In 1925, J.H. Pitman commented on the Leviathon simile in Paradise Lost (I.200-8), seeing “devilish deceit” in the whale’s large size (which can be mistaken for an island). An orthodox reading for Moby Dick is that Ahab, like Satan, destroys himself in a vainglorious attempt at conquest; however this assumes that there are limits to human knowledge and

ambition, as well as some supernatural force that will “punish” transgressors. Perhaps the “evil”

nature of Melville’s book comes from the fact that we might sympathize with Ahab, who (like Manfred or Frankenstein’s monster) responds to assumed limitations with defiance:

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar. I now know that thy right worship is defiance. No fearless fool now fronts thee. Of thy fire thou madest me—a true child of fire. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother I know not! O cruel! what hast thou done with her? Defyingly I worship thee!

(507, qtd. in Levine 261)

Thus Henry Murray could say to the assembled Melvilleans at Williamstown in 1951 as they celebrated the centenary of Moby Dick, “Some may wonder how it was that Melville, a fundamentally good, affectionate, noble, idealistic, and reverential man, should have felt

compelled to write a wicked book. Why did he aggress so furiously against Western orthodoxy, as furiously as Byron, or Shelley, or any other Satanic writer who preceded him, as furiously as Nietzsche or the most radical of his successors in our day?” (Spark 450)

To some extent, Melville’s work can be seen as a response to the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. Nature doesn’t always, Melville might argue, provoke a benign and peaceful response from us; rather its complete indifference and ineffability challenges us to respond with refusal and opposition—the determination to thrive and build despite Nature’s best

one comment on the online forum ilovephilosophy notes, supporting the claim with a quote from Moby Dick: “Aha! Thoreau was wrong in his conception of nature. Only on land—on solid ground—does nature appear simply benign, beautiful and enlightening. On the ocean, man encounters the truer face of nature—wondrous, but also threatening & terrifying. Authentic heroism charges out into the mystery.”

In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing - straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Ahab’s brand of open defiance, even against God, was gaining strength as a response to the the anxiety generated by the terrifying sublime (the abyss of human freedom and the

ambition to conquer Nature’s powerful forces). Many saw Milton’s Satan as a daring and courageous rebel, the original embodiment of perseverance.

In 1857, Baudelaire published a collection of poems known as the Flowers of Evil. In the section “Révolte,” the narrative voice congratulates Peter for denying Jesus; in “Abel et Caïn”

the voice urges Cain to ascend to heaven and throw God to earth. In “Litanies of Satan”, Baudelaire writes:

O you, the most knowing, and loveliest of Angels, a god fate betrayed, deprived of praises,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

O, Prince of exile to whom wrong has been done,

who, vanquished, always recovers more strongly, O Satan, take pity on my long misery!

You who know everything, king of the underworld, the familiar healer of human distress,

O Satan, take pity on my long misery! (273)

This aim of artistic independence, Baudelaire claimed, was to create the new without being hampered by external influences: “The artist stems only from himself. . . He stands security only for himself. . . He dies childless. He has been his own king, his own priest, his own God.” (qtd.

in Whitworth 191)

In 1859 Darwin published The Origins of Species, which caused a “large scale abandonment of literal reading of the Bible” (Woll 197). Increasingly, mankind were seen as rational animals, which should be free to pursue their own interests and personal tastes, even if regarded “immoral.” John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty argued for total freedom of thought and emotion, as well as a liberated sexuality, as long as both parties consent and are of age.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant . . . Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign. (qtd. in Perry 92)

In 1861, the growing clash between the American pursuit of liberty and the slave trade resulted in the Civil War and emancipation. Also in 1862, William R. Alger wrote against The Theory of a Personal Devil, in which he argues that no such Devil can be found in nature:

It is a baffled attempt, a falsity, a mental phantom, and no solution at all. Instead of answering the question, it simply removes the question one step further off, and wins

problem. By the supposition of a Devil, it is plain that we evade, instead of explaining, the origin of evil; for then the Devil is the evil, and we ask how his existence is to be accounted for. (169)

Instead, Alger argues, “Limitation is the true devil.” The moral act of man is the resistance or rebellion against the imposition of external limits, as we saw in Emerson or Thoreau. This revolution can be tragically moral even—or especially—if it fails.

In 1862, Victor Hugo first published Les Miserables, which revolves around the question of evil; a criminal steals a loaf of bread and is confined to prison, an officer attempts to uphold the laws that put him there—but has his sense of identity crushed when he realizes he is not the better man. In 1871, Mikhail Bakunin published God and the State, where he confirms the idea of Darwinian evolution. Humans were like apes, until Satan gave them reason.

But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he

emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

Bakunin continues to outline the three essential elements of human development:

(1) human animality;

(2) thought; and (3) rebellion;

He concludes, “To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty.” In 1871, Dostoyevsky’s Demons illustrated the negative, self-destructive tendencies of man. Dostoyevksy’s mysterious, aristocratic Nikolai Stavrogin is based in part on the violent propaganda of Bakunin and his associate Nechaev, which

Dostoyevksy’s biographer Joseph Frank calls “more striking than its total negativism, the complete absence of any specific aim or goal that would justify the horrors it wishes to bring about. It contains blood-curdling exhortations and apocalyptic images of total annihilation: ‘We must dedicate ourselves to wholehearted destruction, continuous, unflagging, unslackening, until none of the existing social forms remains to be destroyed” (qtd. in Fernie 89).

In 1874, Gustave Flaubert published The Temptation of St. Anthony, another “temptation by the Devil” story mimicking Christ’s temptation in the desert. However, rather than resisting worldly pleasures, Anthony becomes delirious in the miracle of life, which leads to an even greater desire to reveal nature’s mysteries.

O joy! bliss! I have beheld the birth of life! I have seen the beginning of motion!

My pulses throb even to the point of bursting! I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl! Would that I had wings, a carapace a shell,— that I could breathe out smoke, wield a trunk, — make my body writhe, — divide myself everywhere, — be in everything, — emanate with odours, — develop myself like the plants, — flow like water, — vibrate like sound — shine like light, squatting upon all forms —

penetrate each atom — descend to the very bottom of matter, — be matter itself! (260)

For those who still believed that human progression and knowledge as positive, Satan was seen as a heroic liberator. In 1875, Madame Blatavksy’s theosophical society referred positively to Lucifer, who she saw as a light-bringer, like Prometheus. She sees that Satan “claimed and enforced his right of independent judgment and will, his right of free-agency and responsibility”

(193)