The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick

By Robert Zoellner

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520313262

Robert Zoellner

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

THE SALT-SEA MASTODON

…the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!

THE

SALT-SEA MASTODON

A READING OF MOBY-DICK

ROBERT ZOELLNER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1973, by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-02339-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-89793

Designed by Eleanor Mennick

Printed in the United States of America

To Anne

and Matthew, Jason, Ben, Stacey, and Evan

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I KANT AND LOCKE The Protometaphorical Substrate

II THE CREATIVE LAMP-MIND The Metaphor of Illumination

III

PRIMAL FORMS AND

Other Constitutive Metaphors

IV THE UNIVERSAL THUMP Jehovah’s Winter World

V QUEEN MAB The Pyramid and Merman as Primal Forms

VI AHAB The Ugly Narcissus

VII ISHMAEL’S HYPOS The Propriety of Devil-Worship

VIII LEVIATHANIC REVELATIONS The Two Whales of Moby-Dick

IX FRATERNAL CONGENERITY The Humanizing of Leviathan

X GREEN SKULLS Ahab’s Entropism and Ishmael’s Cyclidsm

XI QUEEQUEG The Well-Governed Shark

XII NOUMENAL EPIPHANY The Three Days’ Chase

NOTES

PREFACE

THIS BOOK was written in sheer self-defense. I have always found Moby-Dick an utterly compelling novel, like nothing else in American literature. Other novels engage me, interest me, absorb me, divert me, move me. Only Moby-Dick frightens me. At the same time and paradoxically, no other book in any literature has given me so much pleasure. Reading Moby-Dick is for me—the students’ term is entirely appropriate—a real trip. This is because, like Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Joyce, Melville plumbs the depths, bringing back for our scrutiny those aboriginal verities and primal truths which we would not know but which, for our own well-being, we must know. Hence the paradox: the recognition of primal truth is a fearful experience, while the satisfaction of the need for primal truth is a pleasurable one. In Moby-Dick, fear and pleasure are but two sides of a single coin.

Nevertheless, one must somehow defend oneself against books such as Moby-Dick. Some books one simply reads, and absorbs. Others one comes to terms with—or tries to. One way to come to terms with Moby-Dick—probably not the best and certainly not the most courageous way, but one way—is to undertake a systematic analysis of the text in the hope of locating, delimiting, and understanding the sources of the incandescent emotional intensity with which Ishmael invests his story. Such an act of criticism may be fairly characterized as the fearless (more or less) examination of fear, the dispassionate examination of passion. Cognitive psychologists speak of the process called internalization; while the analogy does not hold at all points, this book may be regarded as an act of externalization.

The point is important because the conviction is abroad that an entirely new sort of criticism is needed, one free of the sterilities of the established critical strategies, one which deals directly and immediately with the emotive and intuitive rather than the rational and discursive realities of the work of art. Richard Poirier, for example, quotes Henry James’ preface to The Golden Bowl: It all comes back to that, to my and your ‘fun’—if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly pertinent. Mr. Poirier then extends James’ concept from creation to criticism: On performance, he asserts, on the excitement of doing, on what literature creates by the way of fun—that’s where more of the emphasis should be.

The possibility of such a radically affective criticism has immense appeal, since the reading of Moby -Dick—or any other great work of literature—is, or should be, fan. But Mr. Poirier seems not to realize that the fun occurs, is experienced, precisely in proportion to the extent that one understands the realities, even the frightening realities, with which the artist is dealing. Unfortunately, achieving such understanding is not itself fun. Understanding, conceived of not as a state but as an activity, is usually hard, unpleasant work. It follows that since the act of criticism is nothing if not an act of understanding, a criticism which somehow illuminates, or reproduces, or conveys, the fun or joy or delight of a work of art is, sadly enough, an impossibility. Criticism can deal with the sources of the fun, or the joy, or the delight, but criticism cannot deal with these emotions in themselves, as Mr. Poirier’s own superb essay on Learning from the Beatles proves unequivocally. This, then, is the purpose and province of The Salt-Sea Mastodon: it is written out of the conviction that the reading of Moby-Dick should be fun, immense, often terrifying fun, and it tries to locate the sources of that fun—but for the fun itself one must go to Moby-Dick itself.

One other matter: it is a critical truism that Moby-Dick is a mass of interpretive knots. Most of these will, in my opinion, capitulate to sustained analysis, but one of them is of the Gordian variety— it must be cut rather than untangled. It has to do, of course, with the problem of point of view in Moby-Dick. Traditional opinion proposes that the Ishmaelian, first-person point of view breaks down, the collapse getting under way in Chapter 29, where Stubb and Ahab have a conversation which Ishmael could not possibly hear, and becoming unmistakable by Chapter 37, where Ahab, alone in his cabin, delivers a brooding monologue which Ishmael could report to us only if he were hidden under Ahab’s cabin-table. From this point forward, the argument goes, Ishmael more or less disappears, and we find ourselves dealing instead with Melville. But this is taking far too mechanical and literal a view of the situation. Chapter 46, for example, is a sustained mass of surmises (the tide of the chapter), by means of which Ishmael deals in the most explicit and detailed way with his Captain’s inner thoughts, motives, and plans—and many other chapters of Moby-Dick have the same inferential base. Surely, then, one can argue that if Ishmael can give us conjectural material in expository form, he can also give us conjectural material in dramatic form—at least there is nothing in the Ishmaelian sensibility to preclude such a sophisticated exploitation of the imaginative and inferential faculties. Such a line of argument permits the cutting of the Gordian knot: the root assumption of The Salt-Sea Mastodon is that every word of Moby-Dick, including even the footnotes, comes from Ishmael rather than Melville. This assumption, obviously, clears a good deal of ground and simplifies the analytical task, since Ishmael is not Melville, any more than Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain—a simple point which can hardly be overstressed.

Finally, there is the matter of my debts, both obvious and notso-obvious. In prosecuting my own pursuit of the gliding great xii The Salt-Sea Mastodon

demon of the seas of life, I have (to mix some metaphors) cut the trail of nearly every Melville scholar who has gone before me. Where these identities and parallels become substantive, they are acknowledged in the footnotes, although my indebtedness to Howard P. Vincent, Newton Arvin, and M. H. Abrams is of such a special sort that it must be mentioned here. Thanks are due also to Mrs. Severn Towl of the University of California Press, who brought to the manuscript a respect for my convictions and a tolerance of my vagaries that went considerably beyond the imperatives of mere editorial obligation. On a much more general level, I wish to thank Paul Carter of the University of Colorado, Clarence A. Brown and Joseph Schwartz of Marquette University, Henry Pochmann and the late Harry Hayden Clark of the University of Wisconsin, and Court Hotchkiss of Colorado State University, all of whom, either immediately or distantly, contributed to this book in ways far too fundamental and pervasive to be specified here. I am similarly grateful to the hundreds of students here at Colorado State University, both undergraduate and graduate, who have each year opened with me the flood-gates of the wonder-world; their youth, their vitality, and the intensity of their response to Moby-Dick account in large part for whatever virtues this book may have.

The debt which most clearly stands beyond any possibility of repayment, however, I owe to my wife: there is scarcely a single idea in The Salt-Sea Mastodon which, upon first conception, I did not immediately subject to the light of her pellucid intelligence. This is to say that the Zoellners had whale for dinner for more evenings of more years than I care to remember; if my wife ever became bored with the menu, she never betrayed that fact. Finally, thanks of an especially affectionate sort are due to my children who, during the years of composition, kept my desk steadily supplied with crayon whales, construction-paper whales, origami whales, tooled-leather whales, and funny-putty whales, thus constantly reminding me that no matter how elaborate or involuted one’s critical stance, one must ultimately and always approach great Leviathan, and Melville’s great book about him, with the awe, the wonder, and the sheer delight which only a child can truly command.

R. Z.

Fort Collins, Colorado

THE SALT-SEA MASTODON

I

KANT AND LOCKE

The Protometaphorical Substrate

IT IS A MEASURE of the unity of Moby-Dick that despite the multi- plexity of its romantic idiom, one can always discern a core of Yankee simplicity gleaming steadily beneath the baroque surface. Newton Arvin has remarked how the voice of Moby-Dick reflects a series of dualities: it is both immediate and primordial, both local and archetypal, both journalistic and mythopoeic.¹ This dualism extends outward to the whole tradition from which the novel springs, both English and American. One has constantly the sense of a sturdy Bunyan, a pedestrian Defoe, masked only partially by the verbal effulgences of a Thomas Browne. Critical attention has been directed preponderantly to the primordial and mythopoeic in Moby-Dick. As a consequence, the simplicities of the novel have often been lost in the subtleties. But the simplicities are there, and since our concern in these opening chapters is not with the primordial or mythopoeic, but rather with the philosophical, it is essential that we reach them.²

Despite its enormous complexity, Moby-Dick can be reduced to one or two ultimate questions. The first question is: Is Ahab’s version of the cosmos correct? The second is: If Ahab is wrong concerning the meaning of the cosmos, does the novel offer an alternative version? Restated dramatically, these questions become, first, Is Ahab right about the White Whale? and second, "If Ahab is wrong, then what is the truth about Moby Dick? Behind these paired formulations lie two assumptions, that there is a reasonably unequivocal statement of truth in the novel which is susceptible to philosophical paraphrase, and that this truth is accessible to the careful reader. The place to begin testing these propositions is the Quarter-Deck" scene in which Captain Ahab tells the assembled crew that they have shipped on the Pequod, not for sperm oil and profit, but rather to effect their Captain’s vengeance against a great albino Sperm Whale that had, the year before, sheared off his leg in a sea-fight. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! shouts Ahab, to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. But Starbuck resists the magnetically demonic power of the frantic old man. Vengeance on a dumb brute… that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

The chief mate’s objections elicit from Ahab a little lower layer of meaning. It is this attempt to satisfy Starbuck’s pious abhorrence of Ahab’s vengeful quest which gives us the philosophically pivotal passage of 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 ’ris 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. (36: 143-44) ¹

Ahab thinks he sees, in the processes and events of life, evidence of a directive intelligence, malicious and inscrutable, which Moby- Dick either embodies or represents. But in the course of getting this idea across to the appalled Starbuck, Ahab manages to express a comprehensive philosophy concerning the nature of reality and his relation to it. Ahab does not trust, indeed he rejects, the evidence of his senses. The outer realm of solid stuff that we know through sensation, through the perception of shape and color and position, through taste and texture and heft—this tactile world has become for Ahab mere pasteboard. What he does not say, but what he appears to grasp, is that color is in the eye, smell in the nose, touch in the nerve-ends in the finger-tips. He would know visible objects absolutely; he can only know them sensuously. The perceived world thus becomes not only a mask which lies, but a visible wall, often seductively beautiful, which surrounds Ahab as he is surrounded by his skin, traps him as he is trapped by the dermal interface between himself and outer reality, making him a prisoner.

The object-world appears to have no meaning for Ahab. He is unable to draw inferences of any kind from it; it is simply unreasoning. But the object-world viewed relationally becomes a processworld, and in the processes which often define visible objects, in the world seen as events, as living acts, and as undoubted deeds—here Ahab thinks he is able to achieve a trans-phenomenal perception of some unknown but still reasoning thing behind the phenomenal mask. He appears to agree with the narrator of Pierre, the novel written immediately after Moby-Dick, who, while he dismisses both Faith and philosophy as mere air, nevertheless goes on to assert that events are brass.³ It is this brassy world of events which gives Ahab the firm epistemological toehold that mere pasteboard could never supply. Ahab realizes that no event, except superficially, can be described as accidental. Even the most spontaneous of happenings represents a concatenation of causes both immediate and remote. Brooding over the loss of his leg, Ahab finds that he cannot view it accidentally, as Starbuck suggests, but only concatenatively. Where causes concatenate, he appears to reason, there must be an intelligent concatenator.

Two metaphors structure the quarter-deck passage, the metaphor of whiteness and the metaphor of the wall, the two fusing in Ahab’s statement that the White Whale is a wall shoved near to him. Whiteness, of course, is not simply the real color of a real albino whale. On this level we have mere pasteboard data from a pasteboard world. Rather, whiteness is metaphorical affirmation of Ahab’s ability to make an inferential, trans-phenomenal thrust beyond the chromatic dungeon of phenomena to the colorless world of things-as-they-are-in-themselves. The metaphor of the wall is equally important for the entire novel because it formulates phenomenal experience as a surface or interface. Such a formulation establishes (given Melville’s talents) a dimensional and kinesthetic vehicle for the handling of a large variety of philosophical concepts. Melville (or rather, Ishmael) will speak of that which is above the phenomenal interface, that which is below the interface, and that which appears on or in the interface. Further, one can give kinesthetic formulation to the idea of perception as the act of rising above the interface, or of diving or thrusting through the interface to the other side, as when Ahab speaks of strik [ing] through the mask.

In summary: for Ahab, phenomenal experience is a pasteboard color-world or wall; beyond the surface of the wall is the non-color world of things as they are in themselves. The wall or interface imprisons us sensibly, but inferentially it is penetrable because events or processes, the concatenative undoubted deed, provide a trans- phenomenal point d’appui for one or another kind of kinesthetic movement (thrust, strike, leap, dive) from the world of appearance to the world of fact. Ahab’s speech therefore gives us a three-word protometaphorical paradigm² which shapes virtually every page of Moby-Dick. It is color: interface: non-color.

These conceptual simplicities, however, are achieved at the price of a crucially significant oversimplification. For Ahab’s quarterdeck speech makes it clear that he regards perception as unidirectional, moving from object to perceiver, never the other way. Perception is for Ahab input only. First, there is the phenomenal input, the seductive color-world which addresses itself to what he later calls the low, enjoying power (37: Z47). Ahab has, he thinks, the truth of that input: it is false, mere pasteboard. Second, the trans- phenomenal white world that he perceives as embodied in the albino whale is also, as he regards it, simply a question of input, addressed to the inferential faculty. This input he is certain is true, and he is ready to act on that truth. Nothing in what he says suggests that he has considered the possibility that perception may contain an element of output, moving from perceiver to object, rather than the other way around. Most revealing are the specifications which he later supplies to the P e quo cPs carpenter for a fifty-foot man with a quarter of an acre of fine brains and arms three feet through the wrist. His idea of a perceptual apparatus for such a monster is hardly conventional: "… let me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards'? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards" (108: 35)0; italics mine).⁴

There are the best of dramatic reasons for this polarization of Ahab’s epistemology. It is imperative that he accept both phenomenal and trans-phenomenal data as sufficient in themselves to supply a basis not only for judgment, but for action. To doubt the autonomy or the judgmental viability of either the phenomenal data which he rejects or the trans-phenomenal data which he accepts would be to throw into doubt his whole quest, and to destroy the certainty of what Moby Dick represents. Ahab’s monomania will live and thrive only so long as he keeps intact his simplistically sensational, unidirectional epistemology.

From a characterological point of view, too, it is appropriate that Ahab should hew undeviatingly to the idea of perception as input. He is not a philosopher; he is a shaggy Nantucket sea-captain. Although, as Peleg tells Ishmael, Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals (16: 76), his fundamental patterns of thought have been formed, not in the academy, but rather in the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north. His whole life’s experience on the primordial sea has suggested to him that the vast realm of nature, phenomenally or trans-phenomenally regarded, impresses itself upon us, never the other way around. As Ishmael puts it, in the long night-watches, Ahab’s globular brain and… ponderous heart have received (the passive tonalities of the passage are important) all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast (16: 7z). Ahab’s greatness—and his weakness—lie in the tragic simplicity and terrible necessity with which he accepts, child of the waters that he is, the input from the natural world and, having accepted, judges and acts upon it.

But if Ahab is philosophically unsubtle, if his ontological divinations are as rough-and-ready as the peg-leg with which he stumps about the Pequod, he is quietly and constantly observed by a mind of bookish, even pedantic, subtlety—by Ishmael, who, as he tells us his story, assures us that he has swam through libraries (32: 118). Ahab is philosophically significant, but he cannot be philosophically informative. The rigidities of his monomania, the committed intensity of his hatred for Moby Dick, make him dogmatically affirmative rather than speculatively tentative. He dominates the crew and drives the Pequod forward by force rather than philosophy. It is Ishmael, obsessed by hypos, hounded by unbidden infidelities, skeptical of all things (and most especially of philosophy!)⁵ who is the book’s true philosopher, the steadily on-going voice that supplies the meditative, introspective counterpoint to Ahab’s dogmatism.

The passage which best typifies both Ishmael’s philosophical cast of mind and his sailor’s suspicion of formal philosophy occurs near the end of Chapter 73. With the gigantic head of a Sperm Whale hoisted up on one side, the Pequod is canted over perilously. So Stubb and Flask kill a right whale and hoist its head on the other side:

As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right. (73: 277).⁶

A hasty reading might suggest a flat rejection of philosophy, but Ishmael’s own constant philosophizing makes it more likely that he is expressing a sailor’s impatience with schools and creeds, with the divisions and discriminations of formal philosophical inquiry. Ishmael is speculatively inclined, but the intensity of his personal quest would make him wildly impatient with, for example, Locke’s division of ideas into simple and complex, or his discussion of complex ideas as modal, substantial, or relational. All such hair-splitting would strike the bedeviled Ishmael as so much thunder.

Nevertheless, certain saliences of the over-all Lockean topography would appeal deeply to Ishmael’s imaginative apprehension. Locke’s stress on intuitive knowledge, characterized by a Cartesian clarity and vividness, would have struck a responsive chord in the Ishmaelian sensibility, itself so habitually intuitive. Locke’s affirmation of the reality of some sort of external and substantial world as something more than bare possibility would appeal deeply to the radically tactile sensibility of a schoolmaster turned sailor, the bookish man in an action-world. More narrowly, Locke’s division of the qualities of the external world into primary ones such as solidity, extension, figure, motion, and number; and secondary ones such as color, sound, and taste—the perceptual dualism implicit in this formulation would at least distantly account for Ishmael’s sensuous apprehension of a colored or secondary cosmos beneath which is hidden a primary cosmos of palsied whiteness (42: Z70).

Before Ishmael followed his own advice (if indeed he did) and threw the Lockean thunderhead overboard, he would almost certainly retrieve Locke’s stress on sensation, the immediate impact of the substance-out-there as the source of simple, true, and ineluctable ideas which are the raw matter of knowledge. One of the most most striking things about the world of the Pequod as Ishmael recon structs it for us is that it is in no real sense reflective or ratiocinative. Ishmael may be a meditative, thoughtful fellow, but nevertheless all of the problems posed to him, the insights he achieves, and the resolutions he experiences, occur consistently in the sensuous world rather than the reflective. Ishmael is overwhelmed by things rather than ideas. Indeed, ideas themselves tend to become things: when Ishmael speaks of the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (1: 16) as finally driving him to sea, he is speaking of the tactile thing-as-idea rather than of an idea as such. At least some of this tactility would seem to have its source in Lockean sensationalism. In Moby-Dick ideas carry an unmistakable empirical coloration, have almost literally, like the two philosophical whale heads, sheer mass and tonnage.⁷

If we cross the Pequod’s deck to contemplate the Kantian thunderhead, we will find it easy to imagine Ishmael’s impatience with the German philosopher’s meticulous distinctions between, say, sensibility and understanding, or his schematization of the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality—again, so much sheer thunder, of little help to a man pursuing the gliding great demon of the seas of life (41: 162). But surely, before he consigned the Kantian head to the abyss, he would have noticed that Kant confirms the sensationalist basis of experience, while insisting upon a priori conditions which make the experience possible. Kant’s stress on the way the mind is not only able to perceive data, but also to think such data —in effect, the mind’s ability to think objects (not to be confused with knowing them)—would have found a deep response in the habitual analogism of Ishmael’s own perceptual apparatus. It seems fairly clear that the dynamic interpenetration of percept and concept in the Kantian critique lies behind the linked analogies and cunning duplicate [s] (70: 264) of the inner and outer worlds of Moby-Dick.

Kant’s conviction that, while we do not make the world as it is in itself, nevertheless we create what we call the objective world by the imposition of space, time, and the categories upon the raw sensational input—this shaping and ordering power would find resonant affirmation at every level of Ishmael’s creative sensibility, a sensibility for which the only world which is real is in large part the world as individually perceived, and thereby made. Ishmael will discover that Ahab’s cosmos is not his cosmos, nor Ahab’s whale his whale. Behind this discovery at some undefined remove there lies the Kantian conviction that we do indeed, in some limited sense, make our own world out of the raw stuff of the noumenal substrate. In making this extrapolation from philosophy to literature, Ishmael will convert the impersonal Kantian universals into the personal and private imperatives of his own creative faculty, but the connection is discernible despite this shift. The Kantian thunderhead may go overboard with the Lockean, so that Ishmael may ride light and right as befits a sailor, but a conceptual residue remains to shape the great metaphors in which he tells his story.

I do not suggest that this residue represents a Kantian-Lockean synthesis which is internally consistent in any formal sense. It is sometimes possible to achieve aesthetic coherence only at the price of philosophical inconsistency. No doubt Kant and Locke are merely counter-words for the broad philosophical polarities represented by empiricism versus idealism, or that which is imaginative contrasted to that which is real. Taken in this way, evidences of an aesthetic synthesis are unmistakable in much that Ishmael says. In Chapter 114, The Gilder, afloat on a sea of dreamy quietude, Ishmael discovers a land-like feeling towards the sea, with its long-drawn virgin vales and mild blue hill-sides. You almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. In the contemplative stillness, external empirical fact and internal imaginative construct synthesize, becoming indistinguishable: And all this mixes, Ishmael continues, "with your most mystic mood: so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole" (114: 405-06-, italics mine).

This seamless unity of perceiver and perceived, of the outer world and the inner, sets Ishmael apart from Ahab. This is what will save Ishmael while Ahab goes down to destruction: his sense of oneness, increasing radically as Moby-Dick progresses, with the external world. These differences are illuminated by Chapter 99, The Doubloon, where seven members of the crew comment on the gold coin from the Republic of Equador nailed to the mast as a reward to the sailor who first sights Moby Dick. The gold piece is elaborately inscribed: … you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac. Such coins are glowing Quito symbols for the sensuously apprehended phenomenal world: Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and stars; ecliptics, homs-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped (99: 555»). Each perceiver sees something different in the doubloon. Egotistical Ahab sees three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab. Pious Starbuck sees three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity. Stubb, attracted to the zodiacal symbols, fetches his almanac to help him give a rollicking rendering of life’s stages, while little Flask reduces this golden microcosm to sixteen dollars: … and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. After the Manxman, Queequeg, and Fedallah provide equally individualized readings, little mad Pip sums up for all, emphasizing the apparently subjective nature of the act of perception by quoting from Murray’s Grammar-. I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look (99: 359-62).

The Pequod’s Captain asserts that this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe—and this is obvious enough. What deserves careful scrutiny is the inference he derives from this analogy. He goes on to say that the doubloon is like a magician’s glass which to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. This is in consonance with the epistemological version of reality which Ahab gave to Starbuck in the quarter-deck scene. There he asserted that the phenomenal world was a wall or pasteboard mask which cozened the perceiver, and prevented him from knowing reality absolutely. Here, the wall-mask becomes reflective, opaque in the sense that a mirror is opaque, bouncing back man’s interior image of himself at himself, in a deceptive process of hopeless circularity. This opacity exasperates Ahab: Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself.⁸ Two points distinguish this epistemological view from Ishmael’s. First, in contrast to Ishmael’s meditation amid the dreamy quietude of the sea, Ahab’s scrutiny of the doubloon suggests no interpenetration of fact and fancy, of external empirical datum and internal imaginative construct to form one seamless whole. Imagination figures not at all in this mechanical version of perception. Instead, Ahab and the world he perceives remain dichotomized: the mirror is only a mirror, standing outside of and apart from Ahab. The fact that it shows him himself does not mean that there is any sort of substantive identity between within and without, but only a mechanical, abortive sort of reflecting. Second, the failure of Ahab to account for imagination or creative intuition in his mirrorparadigm eliminates the possibility, which Ishmael’s seamless whole keeps open, that the perceiver himself may possibly contribute something to the data of perception. Shortly after Ahab abandons the doubloon, Stubb, leafing through his almanac in search of zodiacal information, makes a remark about books which applies as well to the doubloon-mirror: … the fact is, you books must know your places, mutters Stubb to his almanac. "You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but vce come in to supply the thoughts" (99: 360-61-, italics mine). Data from the outer world must be accompanied by data from the inner world, the two interblending. It is Ahab’s failure to take into account the possibility that he makes a contribution to the act of perception that sustains his tragic dissociation from the object-world of phenomena. Thus, the difference between Ahab, the dramatic expositor of Moby -Dick, and Ishmael, the narrative expositor, is epistemological. They do not agree on the relationship between perceiver and perceived. This disagreement fies at the root of any attempt to establish a definitive interpretation of Moby-Dick. If Ahab is right, then Ishmael is wrong; if Ishmael is right, then Ahab is wrong. These alternatives articulate a precise investigative trajectory: if we are ever to make sense of the novel, we must first try to discover whether the text and the extracetological data, taken together, offer bases sufficient to justify a choice between the Ahabian and Ishmaelian epistemologies.

In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams’ study of the romantic sensibility,